


Among Conflicting Winds in a Frail Boat

by rabbit_habits



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Hawke never escapes Lothering, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Mentions of past abuse, Oral Sex, Past Sexual Abuse, Rimming, Slow Burn, Use of In-Game Dialogue, discussion of suicidal thoughts, mentions of past sexual abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2019-10-06 10:25:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 39
Words: 232,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17343599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_habits/pseuds/rabbit_habits
Summary: “I will help you,” he said.“Thank you,” Anders replied, gratitude rushing over him in a giddy whirl that made the room tilt a bit. That could have been the paralyzing fatigue, though.Fenris gave him a level stare that was as flat as his voice. “I’m not doing it for your thanks. I am doing it to be free of you.”In a Kirkwall that never knew the Champion, Anders and Fenris must forge their own uneasy alliance.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A massive thank you to saltedpin for the beta, advice, and encouragement!
> 
> This story is complete. Updates will be on Mondays.
> 
> Some tagged characters will appear later in the story but will play important roles.

He smelled it first, even before he saw the body swinging back and forth between two Fereldan refugees like a dry willow leaf twisting on a branch, smelled it over the citrus tang of elf blood, over the odor of sawdust soaked in blood and sick that always filled his clinic, over the constant sewer stench that Darktown exhaled like some sort of foul beast. Lyrium. It smelled like the air right before a lightning strike, like the smell of sweat right before a fever breaks, like an ember just about to catch and ignite dry wood.  


_Potential_ , Anders thought, the scent seeming to singe his nose, _it smells like potential_. And it _sang_ , sang loud enough to wake Justice in his head like a thunderstorm muttering from far away. Maybe it sounded different to everyone, from the dwarves pressing their ears to cave walls to hear its muffled chorus to templars trembling with craving for it, sounded like whatever you most wanted in life. To Anders, it sounded like the tiny pop of a needle pricking fabric and the faint hiss of thread being pulled through it, the breathy, shuddering whisper of a lover, the purr of a kitten with a belly full of cream, the distant throb of the sea.  


“The Guard dumped this one in Lowtown,” Lirene said, directing the refugees with their blood-soaked burden to one of the open cots. Anders blinked, feeling as if he had just woken up from the smoked-glass world of the Fade, the smell and song of the lyrium still fogging his head, and looked at her for the first time, at the massive sword in her arms that was almost as tall as she was. She dropped it on the wooden floor with a hollow _thunk _. “Said he was found outside some mansion in Hightown, so he must be a thief or a mercenary.”  
__

__The two Fereldans hoisted the body up and dropped it onto the cot with as much care as Lirene had dropped the sword. Slender limbs splayed over the sides of the narrow pallet, one mostly bare foot landing in a pile of filthy sawdust, a long arm ending in a gauntlet with wickedly pointed metal claws hanging limply outstretched in the air, the fingers curled as if still trying to grasp something. Blood dripped from those claws, human blood, Anders could tell, metallic-smelling rather than clean and faintly sour like elven blood, and twining up the arm from the top of his vambrace was a silvery-white, sinuous line, like scar tissue, livid against the tan skin. For a moment, the lyrium song grew louder in Anders’s ears – could anyone else even hear it? – and he pushed himself to his feet from the crate he’d been sitting on, feeling fatigue settle onto his back like a heavy cloak.  
_ _

__Lirene stepped toward him as if to block his way, her arms crossed over her chest. “I shouldn’t have even brought him here,” she muttered in a voice that didn’t seem pitched for anyone’s ears but her own. “Should have dumped him in the Alienage and let the elves take care of him. Or into the harbor.”  
_ _

__“Why?” Anders asked, edging around her. He was only half-listening, really, too occupied with following those strange lines along the elf’s arms and throat with his eyes, up to where they came to a curled stop under his lower lip. Something itched at his memory, something about Tevinter and lyrium, but he couldn’t fix his mind on it.  
_ _

__“You shouldn’t waste your power on a mercenary or a… whatever he is,” Lirene said. “Whatever happened to him, he probably brought it on himself. You should save your strength for the refugees, people who actually need you.”  
_ _

__Annoyance crackled through him, Justice’s rumbling growing loud enough to drown out the lyrium’s voice. A chill prickled the hair on his arms and the back of his neck, and for a moment, he was back in the cold damp of the tower where he’d spent a year with no company but Mr. Wiggums. He had certainly brought that on himself, but had he deserved it? Had he deserved the beatings? He swallowed down the sickly taste that had coated his tongue and tried to make his voice even, casual almost, as he leaned over the cot to examine the patient, though he didn’t feel like he was seeing anything other than the lines in the elf’s flesh. “We don’t know what happened to him, though. He could be innocent and was just attacked by thieves.”  
_ _

____“In my experience, people who carry swords like that aren’t innocent,” Lirene replied, arching an eyebrow and glancing down at the sword next to the cot.  


“Many say the same thing about people who can do magic,” he said, hearing his annoyance seep into his voice and make it brittle, like water flowing into the cracks of a rock and freezing. He gently thumbed open one of the elf’s eyes and found himself staring into a black pit, wreathed with the narrowest band of green. It was like looking down a deep well with moss growing around the edges. Even the small wedge of light that usually softly glowed in the eyes of elves had gone out as shock had set in. “And most of Kirkwall would say the same of Fereldans.”  


__Lirene sighed, sounding as tired as Anders felt. “Perhaps you are right. Forgive me. Ever since that officious dwarf came into the shop, demanding to know where to find you, I have been uneasy.” She caught Anders’s questioning glance, maybe even noting the panic in it that he had tried to quash. “I sent them away empty-handed, though the younger one did his best to charm me. Your secret is safe from dwarven fortune hunters, at least.” She looked down at the unconscious elf and sighed again, though this time it sounded less tired and more of a purging, as if she could exhale the troubles of starving refugees, prying dwarves, spitted elves, and fugitive apostates. “Do what you want, but don’t forget the ones who need you the most.”  
_ _

__Anders didn’t respond, and after a moment, her footsteps shuffled away, scuffing through the sawdust and straw on the floor. He reached down and brushed his suddenly hesitant fingers over the jagged gash in the elf’s armor. It was stained black with dried blood, and Anders thought he caught the faint gleam of the dim light glinting off exposed viscera. He knew he should have been casting a healing spell, knitting together the torn flesh still mostly hidden by armor, but instead blue light flickered around his fingers, the old electricity trick he’d used at The Pearl so many years ago, and he ran his hand along the elf’s limp arm, hovering above the line that seemed etched into it. The line – it must have been a tattoo, though it still looked slightly raised, like the veins on the underside of a leaf – lit up, following the path of his fingers, its blue an answering echo of the blue of Anders’s magic. The lyrium sang brighter than before, a chime of clear bells, and the Fade seemed to beckon, even stronger than it normally did when he was casting spells. He watched, fascinated, as his hand left pale, glowing blue seams of flame along the elf’s skin, as if it were a dragon breathing a trail of fire across a blighted landscape.  
_ _

__The elf let out a low, ragged groan from deep in his throat, and his dark eyebrows knitted together, tiny wrinkles like minute knife slashes in kidskin appearing between them. Behind the silky skin of his eyelids, his eyes rolled in their sockets, back and forth, back and forth, and he started to thrash on the narrow cot, lithe muscles straining against nothing. Anders let the electricity wink out of his hands and reached out to the Fade again to heal.  
_ _

__The wound must have been deeper, much deeper, than he’d guessed. Exhaustion rolled over him, and he could feel his mana dwindling, thinning until his connection to the Fade felt finer than a thread. He knew he couldn’t over-extend himself – there were too many people who depended on him to stay well and functional – and he liked to think he had enough control not to kill himself by now. The elf arched up off the cot, back as taut and curved as a tightly strung bow, neck outstretched, and all of the markings on his body began to glow a harsh, pulsing blue so bright that it hurt Anders’s eyes to look at it. As he squeezed his eyes shut against the blue glare, willing himself to be strong enough to finish the healing, he felt a tiny puddle of mana seem to well up out of nowhere. Desperately, he drew on it. _It’s the lyrium_ , he thought, _in the tattoos___.  


Finally, even that small reserve of mana evaporated, slipping through Anders’s fingers in a last weaving of healing, and the elf collapsed bonelessly onto the cot, the light going out of him, leaving the room even dimmer to Anders’s eyes than before. The elf’s breathing was calmer, soft and rhythmic, and his jaw and brow had unclenched, even though his silvery-white hair still clung to the sweat on his forehead in curves that mimicked his tattoos. It was done, Anders realized with relief, before he sat back on his heels and sleep enveloped him where he knelt.  


****************

The strange elf slept for three days. Anders had asked around Darktown when he was able to venture out of the clinic if anyone knew anything of a white-haired elf, possibly from Tevinter, who carried a sword the size of an ogre’s cock, and had gotten a few of the refugees to ask the elves in the Alienage, but no one seemed to know anything. It seemed as if he’d been dropped into Hightown from the claws of a dragon flying over Kirkwall and, like any newcomer to the city, been stabbed on arrival. By the second day, Anders had better things to worry about than the identity of a patient taking up a much-needed bed in the clinic, lyrium tattoos or no. It had been more than two weeks since his last message from Karl, smuggled out of the Gallows by a maidservant. Anders had answered the last letter immediately, as he always did, fearing every time that that note might be the last, and since then… nothing. They had been so close to finalizing the plan to free Karl; it had been the first glimpse at hope Anders had had since arriving in Kirkwall among a flood of refugees, their despair blending with his own, _becoming _his own. He had come so far for Karl, first to find him and then to save him, but now it seemed that the Gallows might as well have been on the other side of the Amaranthine Ocean from Darktown.__  


He was just straightening from healing a young Fereldan boy’s broken leg, trying to ignore both the call of the lyrium in the elf’s tattoos and that little well of mana they seemed to offer that felt like the answer to the knots of fatigue in his muscles, when he noticed the elf was awake. Awake and staring at him with eyes that were pinched with fury at the corners. Anders was gratified, at least, to see that the golden light was back in them and the green far eclipsed the black of the pupils.  


“A mage,” the elf said, the words sounding forced through tightly clenched teeth. His voice was thick with disgust that Anders would have reserved for sewer rats or templars, and sounded somehow rusted, like an old iron gate that hadn’t been opened in years. “I might have known.”  


“Yes, you might have,” Anders replied, tucking a blanket around the now-sleeping boy and walking over to the elf’s cot. “After all, who else could have healed a torn-open gut like yours? It looked like it had been made with a blunt butter knife. Though well done you for staying alive long enough to be dragged here, I suppose.”  


“I remember nothing of that,” the elf murmured, a faint crescent appearing between his black brows as he furrowed them. He glanced away from Anders, suddenly diffident, head bowing and shoulders hunching upward. One gauntleted hand grazed his side where the wound had been, where Anders could still see the new tender white flesh through the hole in the elf’s armor. “I imagine I must appear ungrateful,” he said, his eyes ticking upward slowly to meet Anders’s. “If so, I apologize, for nothing could be further from the truth. I am afraid that I have no coin, but I am in your debt nonetheless.”  


Anders raised one eyebrow. There was something unnerving about the elf’s newfound politeness; it had the careful insincerity of one whose well-being depended on keeping the powerful and capricious happy. Anders had heard it too often from the mouths of Circle mages in the company of templars. “I help anyone who is brought to me,” he said, shrugging. “Most of them can’t pay. You weren’t really in any state to give me permission to heal you.” He was tempted to ask if the elf would have allowed it if he had been, but he didn’t think he would like the answer or be very surprised by it.  


The elf swayed, as if stunned by a dragon’s roar, and Anders reached out to steady him, his fingers brushing over the tattoos on his biceps. With a hiss that sounded more pained than angry, the elf jerked his arm out of Anders’s grasp.  


“Fine, fall over then,” Anders said, sitting down on another cot opposite the elf. He wished _he_ could have slept for three days, but even if he had had no patients, he always had to stay vigilant about the templars, and then there was Karl….  


“I would have preferred an herbalist’s potion,” the elf said. He gripped the frame of the cot to hold himself upright, clutching it so hard that his gauntlet cut grooves into it, the half-rotten wood squeaking with the strain.  


“Then you would have died with even less coin then you have now, since a potion would have drained right out of the hole in your side.” Anders glanced down at the elf’s feet, their long toes half-buried in the straw on the floor. “Less coin and wet feet.” When he looked up again, the elf was staring at him, alarm briefly blotting out the disgust on his face. Anders bit down hard on his lower lip to keep from laughing; the expression suited the elf far less than the oddly ingratiating, overly formal politeness had. “What were you doing in Hightown anyway?” he asked before the elf could string together another sentence of stiff, insincere words. “Not many elves there, except at the Blooming Rose. Actually, you might be quite popular there. It would be safer work than being a mercenary too.”  


The color drained from the elf’s cheeks even more, until they were as pale as his tattoos, except for bright red spots on each cheekbone, as someone had pressed their thumbs hard against them. _So he’s been in Kirkwall long enough to know about the Rose_ , Anders thought.  


“I, uh…” the elf cleared his throat hard, but his voice still sounded choked when he said, “I am not a mercenary. I have been, but not now.” The tattoos on his throat rippled as he swallowed. “Though perhaps, I should… I do not wish to be in your debt. I can think of few things worse than feeling beholden to a mage.”  


“All you can do for me is leave my clinic so someone else can have that bed. And you can forget you were ever here while you’re at it,” Anders said. “I can promise you that I won’t seek you out for your charming company.”  


“My sword is all I have,” the elf went on, as if Anders hadn’t even spoken. “I’m sure there are places in this city that would give me coin for it.” He leaned over to check under the cot before glaring up at Anders through a curtain of white hair. “Unless you have already sold it, that is.”  


Anders rolled his eyes. “I locked it away in my storeroom, since you wouldn’t be needing it. Even now, it would be more use to you as a cane than anything else. I meant it about the Rose. Several of my patients work there, so I could have them put in a good word for you.”  


The elf’s full upper lip twitched upward into a curl as if it was trying to meet his lowered eyebrows, baring his clenched teeth. For a moment, his tattoos flashed blue as they had when Anders had healed him, their soft glow illuminating the flat planes of his sun-dark cheeks. Anders flinched back from the heat of that glare, putting his hands up. The elf was as weak as a day-old kitten, and without his enormous sword, Anders could have easily picked him up by the scruff of his neck and shaken him, with the help of magic or not, but he recognized the rage in the elf’s green eyes as being akin to that he felt every time Justice was about to make an appearance.  


“Would you consider answering a question a fair trade for my services?” he asked quickly.  


The blue flames guttered from the elf’s tattoos like spent candles drowning in their own wax, but his voice was still steeped in poorly concealed fury, for all its flatness. “No.”  


“And I thought you’d be happy to discharge your debt as soon as possible,” Anders said, smiling.  


The elf blinked, his face softening into that incongruous near-servility that Anders had noticed before, the rage retreating from his eyes as quickly as the light had been extinguished from his tattoos. His hand twitched toward the now-healed wound in his side, his expression thoughtful, as if he was reminding himself of something. Then the corner of his mouth curled up, almost so slightly that Anders could have believed it was a trick of the shadows in the poorly lit clinic. “You may ask what you wish, but I will still owe you a real payment,” he said, his voice smoother than before, almost formal. He inclined his head briefly, as if bowing. “I cannot promise I will answer, though.”  


“Fair enough,” Anders replied. He leaned forward, gesturing toward the tattoos twining up the elf’s arm. Even though his hand never came close to touching skin, the elf stiffened, and Anders curled his fingers into a fist and let it drop back into his lap. “What are these? They’re lyrium, aren’t they?” He glanced up at the elf and found him staring at Anders with a sharp, focused intensity that reminded him of a hawk looking at its prey. “When I healed you, I felt….”  


“They are lyrium,” the elf replied, his voice flat as a planed board again. “Burned into my flesh by my former master, to provide the power he required of his pet.” The last word was nearly spat. “Like all mages, all he cared for was power.”  


“So you were a slave?” Anders asked, though questions crowded on his tongue, and on top of them, Justice had begun listening to the elf’s story and his ranting had increased in pitch. Keeping him in check was like trying to slam a flimsy wooden door on a charging Genlock, but Anders wrestled him into silence. After hearing the history of his markings, Anders could understand why the elf seemed to distrust mages – though he would have been quick to point out that not all mages would have committed such atrocities, especially not in Kirkwall, where mages were closer to slaves than to magisters – and having Justice come out now would have been disastrous. “You don’t really have the temperament of a slave,” he said, though now the strange flashes of passivity made more sense.  


As if to prove Anders’s point, anger flared into the elf’s eyes again, and Anders could sense the coiled tension in him. If the elf had been a cat, he would have been crouched down, back legs gearing to pounce. “Is that compliment or an insult?”  


“I didn’t think masters were very tolerant of willful slaves. I was just wondering how he didn’t kill you,” Anders replied with a shrug.  


“I’m assuming there are templars in this city. How have _they_ not killed _you_?” the elf shot back.  


Anders laughed, and for the first time since coming to Kirkwall, it sounded genuine to his own ears. The elf seemed confused by the delight in it, and Anders knew it _was_ jarring to hear a noise with any kind of joy in it in Darktown, among the sound of flies buzzing over blood and sewage and the coughs of people being slowly smothered by chokedamp. It felt like years since he had talked to anyone about something other than their need for help. Not that he resented helping his fellow Fereldans – it was his life’s work now, along with trying to keep apostates out of the templars’ hands – and he wouldn’t have called the elf friendly by any means, but to have an actual exchange with another person, it felt almost _normal_. “It must be because I’m charming,” he managed and had to swallow down more laughter as the corners of the elf’s eyes tightened and his lip hitched upward into a sneer, that now-familiar contempt blotting out the look of confusion he’d had a moment before. _Didn’t even crack a smile_ , Anders thought. If he hadn’t just healed the elf a few days before, he would have guessed that he was constipated.  


With grace surprising for someone who’d recently been nearly gutted, the elf stood, glaring down at Anders. “Perhaps what passes for charm in Kirkwall is different from what is considered charm in Tevinter,” he said. “I must go. Now that I’ve given a mage the ability to set my former master’s hunters on me, I should move on.” He looked up, away from Anders, staring off into the middle distance so intensely that Anders glanced over his shoulder to see if there was something behind him, and his voice became softer again, almost musing. “Though in truth, I would almost welcome him finding me, so I can finally kill him and end this ridiculous chase.” He cut his gaze back down to Anders, swift and jarring as a sword thrust. “Make your request, mage.”  


“Anders. Call me Anders.”  


The elf looked taken aback for a moment, but then gave another quick, formal, oddly deferential bow of his head. “I am called Fenris.”  


“You know, Fenris, you could easily turn me in too. Even if you haven’t been in Kirkwall long, the Gallows is easy enough to find. Just follow the cries of the mages being tortured there. So I think in that respect, we’re equal. In fact, since I don’t even know who your master is, you have the upper hand.”  


__“ _Former___ master,” Fenris replied, but Anders went on as if he hadn’t spoken.  


“I need your help to rescue my friend. And before you ask, yes, he is also a mage. An unfairly imprisoned mage. I haven’t heard from him in weeks, but we’d been planning an escape. If I can get a letter to him and receive a response, I’ll need someone – you – to watch my back when I get him out.”  


Contempt had settled over Fenris’s face like a mask, and the sight of it enraged Justice, filling Anders’s head with tirades about, well, justice. He knew that he and Justice had merged in a way, become almost indistinguishable when it came to whose thoughts and beliefs were whose, but Justice was by far the more vocal, for all he had claimed to want silence. Maybe as a spirit, he had even less social tact than the bit that Anders had cobbled together during his years at the Circle in Ferelden. At least he knew when to shut up. Most of the time. When it was important. Sweat slicked his forehead from the strain of holding Justice back, trying to smother him like wet fingers pinching out a candle flame, and his hands clenched into fists at his sides, nails digging into his palms. His knees almost gave out with relief when Fenris finally nodded.  


“I will help you,” he said.  


“Thank you,” Anders replied, gratitude rushing over him in a giddy whirl that made the room tilt a bit. That could have been the paralyzing fatigue, though.  


Fenris gave him a level stare that was as flat as his voice. “I’m not doing it for your thanks. I am doing it to be free of you.”


	2. Chapter 2

Night in Hightown was quiet, a brittle sort of quiet cracked here and there with an occasional dog’s howl and the scrape of breeze-blown ivy against stone, so different from nights in Tevinter when the rich had their feasts and parties, filling the air with music, the clang of wine goblets, laughter, _decadence_. Fenris liked quiet, but maybe not _this_ sort of quiet, which reminded him of the stoic silence of a slave whose spirit has finally been broken by his master’s beatings. Kirkwall seemed like a broken city, cowed; its feeling of wrongness differed from Tevinter’s, which reminded him of a half-rotten fruit, fetid, oozing filth and sickly-sweetness in equal measures.

He crept through the shadows, drawn by the scent of incense, melted candlewax, and self-righteousness toward the Chantry. The mage, Anders, had finally contacted him after nearly a week to tell him when they were going to go through with this mad plan to snatch a mage from under the very noses of the Kirkwall templars. Fenris had begun to wonder if something had happened, if the templars had sniffed Anders out on their own without him practically delivering himself to them, but the thought hadn’t brought any relief. He would still owe Anders a debt, whether he was an apostate, a Circle mage, or Tranquil. 

In the meantime, he had taken to haunting the mostly empty streets around the Hightown mansion that supposedly belonged to Danarius, his former master, pacing back and forth, trying to make himself go in and do what had to be done. At the end of every night, though, as dawn began to pinken the white stone of Hightown, he would turn on his heel and head back to Lowtown, where the presence of elves was more likely to go unremarked upon. He tried to tell himself that he was waiting until he could be sure that Danarius was really in Kirkwall or until he could afford to hire some mercenaries to help him, but a tiny voice in his head nagged at him that maybe he wasn’t quite ready to be his own master. The worst part was that that voice had begun to sound strangely, inexplicably, like Anders. He was almost glad to hear that voice outside his head now, if only because it meant that he could talk back to it without wondering if he’d gone mad. 

“You couldn’t have worn a cloak or something?” Anders asked, stepping from the shadows into the shifting lamplight before the massive doors of the Chantry. “You’re not exactly inconspicuous, you know.” 

“My markings would still show, and a cloak would interfere with swinging a sword, which is presumably what you need me here for, mage,” Fenris replied. He reached out and flicked one of the ragged feathers on Anders’s pauldron with the sharp tip of his gauntleted finger. “Though it seems that such practicalities don’t occur to you.” 

Anders’s face tightened, and the flickering light from the lamps and stark white moonlight settled into all the faint lines on his face, shadows pooling in the hollows of his unshaven cheeks and the dark crescents beneath his eyes. He’d looked exhausted when Fenris had first met him, but now he looked like a piece of frayed rope in the form of a man. He twitched his shoulder out of Fenris’s reach and took a step back. “I saw Karl go inside a few minutes ago,” he said. “No templars so far.” 

“Then we should move. I have other things to do tonight.” 

“Like staring at a Hightown mansion for hours?” Fenris flinched in surprise, and Anders smirked, some of the light coming back into his eyes. “I may be hiding out in the Undercity, but I still hear things.” 

“It is none of your concern. Let us be done with this.” He let his markings flash for a moment, seeing the blue of them glint off Anders’s narrowed eyes. If he took it as a threat, though, he made no sign. Maybe he was too focused on the objective of finding his friend to be concerned, an idea that was alien to Fenris. Sometimes he thought he remembered caring for someone else the way Anders seemed to care for his friend, but before he could summon a face or a name, the memory would dissipate like mist touched by the sun, and he wondered if it was something he’d dreamt or imagined. Even in Tevinter among the other slaves, he’d had no friends, and neither had any of his fellow slaves. If anything, they schemed and backbit among themselves almost as much as their masters. Anders, from what Fenris could tell, existed only for others – friends, strangers, anyone perhaps except templars – and as a result, the man didn’t seem to have much of a sense of self-preservation, no desire to stay alive just for the sake of being alive. 

“All right. The Chantry should be empty at this hour. All you have to do is keep watch for templars.” 

Fenris nodded and followed Anders through the huge doors into the candlelit stillness of the Chantry. It was so silent that Fenris thought he could hear the hiss of the incense sticks as they died and released their long, curled tails of fragrant smoke. Nothing alive could be in this marble sepulcher of a place. Even the soft slap of his own feet on the stone floor seemed unbearably loud as Anders led him up staircases and past windows that let in moonlight as dense and white as frozen milk. He could feel the tension radiating off Anders into the air between them like the vibrations of a struck gong. Could the man be _afraid_? What would a mage have to fear? Back in Tevinter, Danarius had only feared losing his precious status. 

They stopped short in front of an alcove screened by three heavy columns. Fenris peered over Anders’s shoulder, between the columns and through the hazy golden air, to see a man standing with his back to them. His stillness seemed unnatural to Fenris; it betrayed none of the nervousness that Anders still trembled with. _Either he is certain of rescue or certain of its failure_ , Fenris thought, and he almost said as much to Anders. But when he turned his eyes to Anders’s face again and saw the glow of hope suffusing it – cheeks flushed, eyes widened like a child’s – he bit the words back. _Let him have these moments of happy delusion_ , he told himself. _They may be his last._

“I will stay here and keep watch. Be quick.” 

Anders nodded and headed toward his friend, leaving Fenris in the shadow of a column, staring into the yawning stone mouth of the Chantry’s main hall. He couldn’t help but cut his eyes toward the alcove from time to time, keeping one ear cocked for Anders’s voice. What he heard first, though, was the voice of the other mage – Karl, Anders had called him – low and muffled, but not too muffled for Fenris to miss the droning quality of it, no inflection, no hint of excitement or fear, just as his stance had shown nothing but stillness. 

The contrast was all the more stark when Anders spoke, and Fenris, even though he couldn’t make out all the words, could hear the emotion pulsing through his voice like blood through a vein. He turned more toward the alcove, sparing the main hall a distracted glance every few seconds. It was so quiet that he would easily hear any creak of leather or clank of armor well before the templars were on them – if there even _were_ any templars – he told himself. And even though he hated to admit it to himself, he was curious, maybe not so much about Anders and his friend in particular, but about the lives of free people in general – though from what Anders had told him about Circle mages, they hardly sounded free at all. _But they’re_ mages. _Freedom for them is danger for everyone else._

One clear word drifted to Fenris’s ears, a near-yelp that sounded forced through a tight throat, “No!” The desperation in it jerked his attention away from the main hall completely, and with one hand already reaching over his shoulder for his sword, he started toward the alcove toward the slumping form of Anders, reeling as if he’d been punched. Karl had turned, and even at that distance, Fenris could see the many-rayed sun branded into the center of his forehead. He whirled around, drawing his sword. 

“ _Fasta vass_!” he hissed under his breath, cursing himself for being distracted by his curiosity – he didn’t much care whether the mage lived or died, but if Anders was killed because of his carelessness, Fenris would have considered it a job poorly done on his part, and he had his pride. He shouted, “You’ve been betrayed, mage! We must go!”, hoping that his voice could tear through the veil of grief that had enshrouded Anders and get him to run, but his lapse had made him too late – heavily armored figures were already stepping out of the shadows, advancing toward Anders inexorably as boulders rolling downhill. 

He fell easily into the rhythm of fighting, parrying the slow, heavy thrusts of the templars, hacking through armor and flesh, driving his spiked gauntlet through heads, chests, guts, whatever was within his reach. The gleam of his markings caught on the whites of terrified eyes even through the narrow slits of the templars’ helmets. They were well-trained enough, but they’d never seen the likes of him, he imagined. 

“No!” Anders shouted again, but his voice sounded so different that Fenris paused while wrenching his sword from a dead templar’s ribcage and stared in his direction. A blade whistled past his ear, and he dodged, all the while keeping his eyes on Anders, who had fallen to his knees, his face buried in his hands. 

_Get up! Get up and help me, you fool!_ Fenris thought, trying to will the mage to his feet. The waves of templars seemed endless – where in the Maker’s name had they all hidden? 

Magic crackled in the air as a voice boomed, like lightning and thunder striking at once, as if a storm were breaking directly above them. “You will never take another mage as you took him!” it bellowed. Anders was on his feet again, but was it even Anders? Blue flames burst around him, but his eyes… his eyes were blue flame too, their warm brown subsumed by it, as if they were portals to the Fade, the same blue that lit Fenris’s markings. In all his years in Tevinter, as a slave to a magister, surrounded by other magisters who freely dabbled in blood magic, Fenris had never seen anything like this. Had he agreed to help an abomination? Anger roared in his ears as he fought, anger at himself for being duped by a mage when he knew all too well what they were, anger at Anders for being weak enough to let a demon possess him. _Aren’t all mages weak, though? Especially when offered power._

The odor of incense was drowned out by the scent of blood and burning flesh as quickly as the silence had been rent by the clash of swords and the screams of the dying. As the last templar fell, Fenris doubled over, catching himself on his sword, his knees buckling. Warm blood rolled down his side, smaller rivulets trickling down his arms, though he was gratified to see that most of the blood staining his armor and slicking the bottoms of his feet wasn’t his own. Through a haze of exhaustion, he watched the light go out of Anders, leaving just the man, looking somehow smaller than he had before. 

“Anders, what did you do?” Karl asked. His voice was different now, Fenris noticed – it had the same woolly quality as before, but now he sounded awake. He sounded as tired as Fenris felt and Anders looked. He sounded _afraid_. “It’s like… you brought a piece of the Fade into this world.” 

Fenris turned his stare on Anders, waiting for an answer, a reason why for a few moments they had both had the Fade running through them, bursting through rents in their flesh. Fenris’s had been burned there by magic, but how had Anders come by his? “Yes, mage, what _did_ you do?” 

“I shouldn’t be able to remember what the Fade even feels like,” Karl went on before Anders could respond. He sounded almost normal now, almost reverent. “But it’s like the Fade itself is inside you. Burning like a sun.” Karl reached one hand toward Anders, and for a moment, it seemed to Fenris as if the mage were leaning into his friend’s touch before he seemed to recollect himself and flinch away. 

“Come with me, Karl. I can get you out of here. We can...” Anders’s jaw worked noiselessly. Fenris knew there was no way to undo being made Tranquil, no way even the most powerful magic could knit a new umbilicus to reconnect a mage to the Fade once they had been severed from it. 

“Please, Anders, kill me again before I forget again how I used to be! I don’t know how you brought it back, but it’s fading,” Karl pleaded. Fenris had heard plenty of men beg for death before, men who had lost limbs, been tortured, were holding their own viscera in their blood-stained arms, but none of them had sounded half so desperate as this mage. Was it because at least they would have died as themselves? 

Anders shook his head, his voice thick. “Karl, no.” 

“I would rather die a mage than live as a templar puppet. I may not be able to touch the Fade, but as long as I can remember it, I am a mage. Please, you must do this for me, my friend.” 

“I can’t,” Anders stammered. “Maybe I could… if I could control him….” 

_Him_? Fenris raised an eyebrow. Who was “he”? He opened his mouth to ask – not that he expected an answer from Anders; the man could manipulate the truth the way he could manipulate the forces of nature – but the rattle of the massive Chantry doors stopped the words on his tongue. “Do it, mage! More of them are coming!” 

“Now! It’s fading!” Karl cried out, but Anders seemed caught in one of his own spells, paralyzed, boots frozen to the bloodied tiles. 

“ _Kaffas_!” Fenris cursed, letting his markings flare alight. Avoiding Karl’s once again blank, dead stare, he reached up and, as gently as he could, plunged his fingers into the man’s skull, closing them around the sun-shaped brand as if plucking a fruit. When he withdrew his hand, Karl’s body sank to the floor in a heap. The thump of its weight landing on the carpet seemed to wake Anders. 

“Karl!” He reached for his staff, and Fenris could feel Anders’s magic tugging at his markings, as if the mage was about to tap them the way Danarius had when he wanted to show off how his favorite pet magnified his power. Being killed with magic he provided – it was something he’d long expected from Danarius, and why should this mage be any different? 

“What did you do to him?” Anders demanded. 

“What you should have done but were too weak to do!” Bootsteps rang on the steps, heading for the alcove. “Do you know another way out of here, or do you want to die here with your friend?” 

Anders’s face quaked with indecision, eyebrows that had been pinched upward with sorrow drawing down in anger, quivering lips firming into a scowl. “Yes. Follow me.” 

Fenris limped after him through dark storerooms, biting his tongue to keep from coughing on the choking dust their feet stirred up. Once out in the alley behind the Chantry, he fell back against the stone wall, tipping his head back and sucking in the cool, clean night air. Above their heads, in the gap between the buildings, the sky sparkled as if someone had spilled glitterdust over it. When he closed his eyes, he saw those stars reversed, dark flashing on white. 

Anders had retreated into the darkness on the other side of the alley, but Fenris could sense his eyes on him, crawling over his skin like a nug probing the darkness. 

“You’re injured.” 

“It’s nothing,” Fenris insisted, his eyes still closed, though the warm stickiness of blood still rolled down his side, if anything faster than before. 

He felt Anders’s magic fumble toward the lyrium in his markings again and then draw on it, and before he could protest, he opened his eyes to find the mage’s hands haloed in pale blue fire, passing over his abdomen, his arms, his thighs, hovering over him but never touching. His skin itched as magic stitched it together, and then the blood trickling over his skin was cut off from its source to dry and flake away. The bone-deep exhaustion that had weighed him down had been lifted by the same magic that had sealed his wounds, and without that heaviness dragging at his limbs, he sprang at Anders, shoving him back against the alley wall. Anders’s breath, driven from his lungs by the impact, hit Fenris’s cheeks, hot and damp. 

“I did not escape from a magister to be used by an apostate,” he growled. “You are all the same – taking what isn’t yours to serve your own purpose. Never touch me with your magic again, mage. Never take what has not been offered to you.” 

“You could barely bloody stand,” Anders snapped. “I shouldn’t have bothered, after what you did to Karl.” His voice choked, clamping down so the words came out strangled. He turned his face away from Fenris even as his hands came up, pressed flat against his shoulders, and shoved him back. 

“What I did? I did what he wanted!” _I was more of a friend to him than you were at the end_ , he wanted to say, but he’d never thought of himself as a friend to anyone; the idea was too strange for him to say out loud, as if the words would just hang crookedly in the air like broken-winged bats after he spoke them. 

“It wasn’t your choice! He was better for a moment. Maybe I could have figured it out, maybe I could have done something….” He was pinching his brow the way Fenris remembered from the first time they’d met, his heavy feathered pauldrons not hiding the tired slump of his shoulders. 

“You’re not the Maker. No matter what you mages like to think.” 

“You had no right!” Anders said, but it was as if someone else was speaking through him, that voice that had crashed like a wave through the hollow spaces of the Chantry, and when he raised his head to glare at Fenris, his eyes were swirling maelstroms of pale blue flame. The same fire wreathed his fists. Dark threads of smoke rose, black veins in the blue glow coming from the mage’s eyes and hands. “You must atone for your crime.” 

“Crime? If I had waited for you to act, we would both be dead. My debt to you is paid. Let me go.” He turned toward the mouth of the alley, but Anders – or whoever was speaking through Anders – stepped in front of him. Everything else being equal, Fenris knew he could have easily destroyed him. Even though Anders was taller and broader across the shoulders, food seemed a rare commodity in Darktown, and Fenris suspected that the thick, buckled coat concealed visible ribs and a hollowed-out stomach. And why would a mage have any need of muscle when he had magic? But this Anders seemed more determined, even less likely to listen to reason. Still, a flick of Fenris’s gauntlets would kill this one just as quickly as they would the tired, bedraggled healer Fenris had first met. His markings filled with light, adding to the glow coming from Anders. “Don’t blame me for your failure!” he snarled, shoving his vambraced forearm across Anders’s neck and forcing him back against the alley wall. 

He glared into those fiery blue whorls for a long moment, panting, waiting for flames to engulf him or a fist of magic to strike him down. Half the light in the alley went out, and he was staring into human eyes, eyes whose whites were mapped with a tangle of red capillaries. Still, it would be so easy. One less mage. He pressed harder against Anders’s neck, leaning his weight into it, hard enough to make the mage gasp. 

Anders craned his neck, and Fenris watched, bewildered, as his own reflection grew larger on the brown of Anders’s eyes. Before he could jerk his head aside, the mage’s lips were pressed against his, soft and smooth, like the fingertips of fine, well-worn gloves. What was he doing? Fenris knew what kissing was, though he’d never been kissed before that he could remember – he’d seen plenty of kissing at the orgies that the magisters’ parties usually descended into. And yet, this was somehow different. He kept his lips closed against the soft, persistent pressure of Anders’s, his head spinning as a great tide of blood swelled through him. It pounded in his ears as it gushed and receded and settled as a tightness in his groin, a needy, hungry tightness, like when Hadriana used to take away his meals and he'd go to sleep with that awl of hunger twisting in his stomach and eagerly devour even the spoiled food she finally put before him. That craving, that gnawing, made him want to push Anders harder against the wall and… what? Confusion severed his connection to the Fade and his markings winked out. 

In the sudden darkness, it was easier to pull away, and he stepped back, his blood cooling, the confused desire he’d felt crystallizing into anger. The last thing he’d seen before it had gone dark had been Anders’s eyes, damp and somehow disappointed. _In what? What did he want?_ Fenris thought, which enraged him even more, that the need to serve and please was still so ingrained in him that he cared even for a moment about this mage’s wants. Would he never be free? Would he never be able to worry about his own wants first before anyone else’s, especially those who saw him as nothing but a tool to do their work – their killing – for them. 

“What in the Maker’s name are you playing at, mage?” he shouted. How quickly Anders had progressed from using Fenris’s markings freely to using Fenris’s body freely. Danarius himself would have been impressed. 

“I… I don’t know,” Anders murmured. “Maybe I took a pommel to the head. I shouldn’t have done that – I don’t know why I… It wasn’t… I mean, I was trying to… but I was wrong.” His words spilled from him in a messy slip-and-side, blending into near-meaninglessness. 

Fenris pushed one hand flat against Anders’s chest, feeling the prominence of his sternum even through the metal of his gauntlets, pinning him against the wall. Anders didn’t fight. He didn’t even move, his torrent of words cut off as if slashed with a sharp dagger. In the dark, all Fenris could make out was the mage’s silhouette, and even that flat, black shape had an air of acceptance about it. But he wasn’t going to give Anders what he wanted. He’d had enough of that. With an almost careless swipe of his hand, he backhanded Anders across the face, just hard enough to feel the give of the soft flesh of his cheek under his knuckles. Anders gave a soft grunt, almost of surprise, but other than his head snapping to one side with the force of the blow, he still didn’t move. If anything, he seemed expectant. 

He slid his hand up Anders’s chest, grasped his chin in his spiked fingers, and forced his head forward, digging the points of his fingerguards into the skin, so they were face-to-face again. Magic shot through the lyrium in his flesh as he flashed his markings once more, for the threat of them, but also out of curiosity. He wanted to _see_ the mage’s face, to try to decipher whatever he could read in the man’s eyes. In the sickly blue glow, he saw only sadness there and maybe, somewhere, a hint of defiance, like the last live ember in a dying fire. Blood, black in the bluish light, oozed down his chin onto Fenris’s fingers. 

The sight almost made Fenris sever the magic in his markings, but instead he leaned forward, so close that stray strands of Anders’s blond hair brushed his cheeks. The light from the markings on his chin caught the downturned corners of Anders’s mouth, threw a curve of shadow under his lower lip. The strange, confusing hunger started creeping through him again, and the hand that grasped Anders’s chin trembled. He tried to mask it by digging his fingertips harder into the skin, stubble rasping against the steel of his gauntlets. 

“Next time, mage,” he said, spitting the words through his clenched teeth, “it will be your heart.”


	3. Chapter 3

His mouth tasted like he’d been licking the floorboards at the Hanged Man – vomit and blood and cheap brandy. He stumbled out of the Fade – his connection had been fitful and tenuous because of the alcohol anyway – but didn’t open his eyes, even though he knew he should be getting up, lighting the lamp outside the clinic, setting to work. His heartbeat stampeded in his ears like a herd of spooked Brontos, but that was from the elf’s backhand, not the brandy. Justice didn’t let him get drunk anymore, but he’d managed to get a few cups of brandy down himself to dull the pain in his jaw and drown the image of Karl sinking to the Chantry floor, death glazing his empty eyes. _He was dead already_ , he told himself, _Fenris only killed the body.  
_

_Fenris_. 

He didn’t want to think about that, but memories from the night before that hadn’t been mercifully erased by brandy and grief and minor head trauma arranged themselves like tiles in a mosaic he imagined Knight-Commander Meredith having in her quarters. Not just memories of Karl, his dead voice and deader eyes, but ones of the blue aura of Fenris’s tattoos doing nothing to soften the snarl on his face and his own reflection in Fenris’s eyes. But no, not his, Justice’s reflection, those hollow, flame-filled eyes. _Not Justice either_ , he thought. _Vengeance_. The glow of Fenris’s markings shining on his own skin, making it the pale, sickly blue of a drowned man’s, and the lyrium singing like a mother’s lullaby in his ears, even though he couldn’t remember if his own mother had ever sung him lullabies. Sometimes he thought he could still smell her on the pillow the templars had let him keep, and he could faintly remember the touch of cool, gentle hands, but that was all. 

The Fade had seemed to shine through the elf’s tattoos, like moonlight seen through hands clapped over one’s eyes. He had seen what Fenris had done to Karl, to the templars he’d killed, how he’d reached _through_ them somehow. Would it work if Anders initiated the contact? Could he do it? Would Justice allow it, even if it meant being enveloped by the Fade, sinking into that lyrium song he’d thought so beautiful? Anders didn’t know exactly how the tattoos worked and certainly hadn’t asked. Justice wouldn’t approve of his selfishness, and the guilt at leaving the refugees and the Circle mages was like a constant ringing in his ears, but to be finished with all of it? He hadn’t rested since he was twelve years old, he felt – always running, hiding, fighting. To maybe, finally, be alone. _Haven’t you been alone enough?_ he’d asked himself, remembering the long hours handcuffed in the back of the wagon on the road to the Circle Tower in Ferelden, the endless echoing drip of condensation in the dungeon where he’d been held, Mr. Wiggums’s rough, insistent licking on his fingers and cheeks. Maybe that was why he’d let Justice in. Not out of kindness but more from selfishness, fear of that crushing solitude that made time seem to ooze like congealing blood. 

He’d closed his eyes, leaned forward, and kissed Fenris. 

No void had yawned before him. No hand of the Maker reached out to him, no emerald waters of lyrium lapped at his feet, and when he opened his eyes again, the only death he saw was in the glare twisting Fenris’s face, tugging his black brows together, making his lips curl in disgust under Anders’s. Then the lyrium stopped singing, the light from Fenris was snuffed out, and they stood in the dark. Thick waves of heat and rage roiled off of Fenris in equal measure, but Anders could sense something else, a confusion he could explain and an odd… giddiness or anticipation that he couldn’t and that reminded him of being an apprentice mage at the Circle in Ferelden, sneaking into corners and bunks, hands darting under robes. _It wasn’t_ that _kind of kiss_ , he thought. He should have said something, clumsily explained himself, made a clever remark – not that Fenris seemed to appreciate those – or just run like all the darkspawn in the Deep Roads were on his heels, but he felt tethered by disappointment, grief, the knowledge that Fenris was right and he really _had_ failed Karl. 

The air between them stirred, and all possibility of saying anything disappeared with the very air from his lungs as Fenris shoved him back against the wall, the fingers of one hand fanned across Anders’s chest, curled just enough that he could feel the points of Fenris’s gauntlets, five sharp warnings. 

“I…” he tried to say, but it was more of a gasp than a word, and he had nothing – no words, no breath – to follow it up with. Fenris hissed, a sound like that of breath being caught when an open wound is touched, and the spiked knuckles of his gauntlets swiped across Anders’s cheek and jaw, gouging runnels in his cheek and setting his head ringing. Blood trickled over his lower lip and chin, puddling in his collar. He squeezed his eyes shut and kept his head turned to the side. Maybe the kiss would achieve what he had hoped it would, albeit in a roundabout way. But why had fear begun to tickle in his stomach, buzzing like a cloud of carrion flies around a corpse? After everything he’d lived through, why fear death now? 

The light behind his closed eyelids changed, brightened, and the welling up of that little pool of mana told him that Fenris’s tattoos were alight again, bluish-white, like the brilliant moonshine that flooded Darktown at night, even though the moon itself was never visible. One metal claw trailed up his neck, as if following the path left by the blood. Anders swallowed hard, and the steel point dug momentarily deeper into this throat, scraping his adam’s apple. The gesture could almost have been a caress if not for the cold sharpness of the gauntlet. But any gentleness quickly disappeared as Fenris clamped his fingers around Anders’s chin. He was sure he’d have a circle of bloody pinprick cuts there the next day, if he lived that long. 

He’d known Fenris was strong – he’d felt it when healing him, and in the Chantry, he’d been vaguely aware of the glowing blue death-dealing whirlwind that was Fenris in his peripheral vision, shearing off arms and slicing through armor with one swing – but just how strong didn’t fully hit him until Fenris was dragging him forward by his grasp on Anders’s jaw. He was pulled up onto his toes, feet scrabbling in the dirt and dust of the alley floor, then jerked down so his eyes were level with Fenris’s, the light from the lyrium markings making them look clouded over as if he’d been infected by the darkspawn taint. 

Anders twisted in Fenris’s grip, unable to speak through jaws that were held shut, trying to find enough purchase on the wall behind him with one hand to keep his balance while bringing the other up to hurl a spell at Fenris, just enough to stun him, he hoped, though he’d have to get away before the magic wore off… and he wouldn’t be able to go back to the clinic because Fenris would know where to find him. He considered just going with a swift knee to the groin: simple, effective, stunningly painful. Before he could slam his leg up between the elf’s thighs hard enough to shove his balls up between his pointy ears, he was pushed back against the wall once more. 

The rebound of his head off the stone was cut short, however, by Fenris’s lips crushing against his own, so hard that Anders’s teeth cut into the inside of his lower lip, and for the second time that night, he tasted blood. Maybe this was a new way of suffocating someone? Some Tevinter method of poisoning? It couldn’t have been a kiss. What had happened earlier hadn’t really been a kiss either, but Anders hoped it at least hadn’t been _painful_. He felt Fenris’s breath on his cheeks coming in hot, rapid puffs from his nostrils – his mouth was sealed shut so tightly that even if had been a kiss, Anders couldn’t have returned it properly. He thought again of the juvenile fumblings when he’d been at the Ferelden Circle. There was a childishness to this, a punishing sulkiness, inexperience poorly hidden by aggression. If he could have moved his mouth, he would have laughed. 

Fenris finally drew back, his face still close enough to Anders’s for the tips of their noses to brush, and with a warning squeeze of his fingers, he said, “Next time, abomination, I will tear out your heart.” 

Abomination. Was that what he was, what he’d become? The word echoed in his head and chased him back to the unsettling familiarity of the Fade. 

****************

He was awakened some time later by a light but insistent scratching at his cheek. 

“Stop it, Ser Pounce-a-Lot, I haven’t got any cream for you today,” he murmured without opening his eyes, rolling onto his side to avoid the gentle worrying at his cheek. The soreness from the night before was just beginning to overwhelm the effects of the brandy and reassert itself. 

“Ser Pounce-a-Lot?” a flat, sardonic voice said, the sneer in it tempered by something that sounded almost like laughter. 

Anders’s eyes snapped open, and he bolted upright on the rickety cot, almost tipping it over. Fenris was perched on a crate next to him, light falling through the slats in the storeroom door tangling in his white hair, his hand still outstretched. _He probably sleeps in those ridiculous gauntlets_ , Anders thought. _Maybe uses his breastplate as a pillow_. 

“You had blood on your face,” Fenris said, the barest hint of a shrug twitching one shoulder upward. 

“I can’t imagine how that could have gotten there,” Anders muttered. He scrubbed one hand over his face, fingers scraping across two days’ worth of stubble, some of it clumped together with dried blood and scabs. “Why are you here? It can’t be because you’re curious about my cat.” 

“No,” Fenris replied. Anders found himself beginning to be impressed by how scathing Fenris could make every word – how even when emotionless, his voice still came out in a sneer. He’d said he had been a slave in Tevinter, and Anders wondered what his master thought of being spoken to with that level of contempt. Though from what he’d heard, the Tevinter magisters were always scrambling for power among each other, so maybe Fenris’s former master had used his slave’s tongue as a weapon as much as he’d used his markings. “I’m here to find out what you are.” 

_Abomination_ , Anders’s memory whispered in Fenris’s caustic voice. “I think you’ve already decided what I am,” he said. 

Fenris frowned, the tiny pout of his lower lip accentuated by the tattoos beneath it, confusion crimping his brow. He ducked his head a little in that now-familiar gesture of diffidence, looking at Anders from under his silvery hair with eyes that looked even wider because of his large elven irises. All the light in the dim storeroom seemed to gather in the little slices of golden light overlaying the green. _That’s it_ , Anders thought, _that little sheepish look is what made his master put up with him_. 

“I know you are a mage,” he said, his voice hesitant and turning up at the end as if it were a question, as if inviting Anders to correct him. “I know what mages usually are. I can’t say you are like them… but I don’t know much of you. And you are something else too. Something different. Something I have not seen among all the blood mages and magisters in Tevinter.” 

“I don’t use blood magic! I would never, have never used blood magic.” Justice reared up in him, fully awake, and Anders wrestled him down. If Justice came out now and showed himself to Fenris again before he could explain, Anders was sure he’d end up with worse than a few bruises and cuts on his cheek. He bit hard on the inside of his lower lip and shoved his fingers through his hair. “I… I was a Grey Warden. So I have the nightmares, the taint in my blood, the voice of the Archdemon in my head. All that. It makes for… interesting dreams.” 

“You weren’t sleeping at the Chantry,” Fenris said with an impatient shake of his head. “Your voice changed. Your eyes changed. The Fade was bursting through your skin. That’s not any spell I’ve ever seen.” 

Anders tried to grin, but from Fenris’s bewildered recoil, he figured he hadn’t been very successful. “I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said it was a trick I picked up to impress girls?” 

“No.” 

“Nothing I say is going to make you –” He paused, stopping himself short of saying “hate me any less”. Why should he care whether some elf slave bent on vengeance against all mages hated him or not? Like that of so many others – the entire Templar Order, for instance – Fenris’s hatred would be based solely on something Anders had been born with and had had no choice in, any more than Fenris had chosen to be a slave. He doubted Fenris would see it that way, though. “—trust me any more.” 

“For me to trust you more would imply that I trust you at all,” Fenris replied, “which I don’t.” 

“I don’t know why you seem to think that I owe you any explanation. Our business is done. Your debt is paid. You said as much yourself last night.” _Right before I kissed you_ , he thought, feeling his cheeks warm with embarrassment. That certainly hadn’t been the best or most effective idea he’d ever had. It had failed as badly as his rescue of Karl or his agreement with Justice. His stomach clenched and twisted as if Fenris had punched through his skin and was trying to wrench it out. 

“Because your explanation will help me decide if I report you to the templars or just kill you right here,” Fenris said, tapping one metal-sheathed forefinger against his thumb. The hollow metallic click sent prickles along Anders’s spine, and he rolled his shoulders back as if he could shrug them off. 

“Oh, well, that’s no pressure at all, is it? What you say next will determine whether you die horribly or are imprisoned and just _wish_ you had died horribly. Yes, that seems totally fair.” He glared up at Fenris, whose face didn’t betray the slightest hint of shame or embarrassment at threatening a man in his own home. “You might want to avoid the templars yourself, you know. They’re all addicted to lyrium. Can’t get enough of the stuff.” He was bluffing, of course, hoping that having lived in Tevinter, Fenris wouldn’t know much of templars beyond that they hated mages. He doubted templars would have any use for embedded-in-elf-skin lyrium. From what he remembered from the Circle in Ferelden, most of them seemed to mutter about “the dust” without realizing it. 

Fenris smirked, an upward curl at the corner of his lips as neat as if it had been drawn by a scribe. “I’ve outrun a magister for three years now. A few templars will not be difficult to vanquish.” 

“Fine. All that I ask is that you hear me out before you start with any heart-ripping-out,” Anders said. Fenris gave a shallow nod, fixing wide, expectant eyes on Anders. It was unsettling how still he went – Anders had noticed how fidgety the elf usually was, but now he sat like a carved idol, waiting. “How very magnanimous of you.” He sighed. Maybe he should just write up a pamphlet about how he’d met Justice, so he wouldn’t have to keep explaining it to people. It could even have drawings in it, engravings of the rotting body Justice had inhabited when they met, a picture of the two of them in one body standing in a pile of templar and Warden corpses. For a moment, he tasted blood on his tongue, smelled the acrid char of burning hair and flesh. “In Amaranthine, I met a spirit of the Fade, Justice. We became… friends. He made me realize my own selfishness, that I only ever thought of my own freedom and not that of the other Circle mages.” He sensed Fenris stiffen at that and hurried on. “They’re practically slaves, you know. They’re constantly watched by templars, sometimes beaten by them or raped or worse. Maybe I was one of the lucky ones – I was only beaten when I tried to run and was kept in solitary confinement instead of made Tranquil. The templars were more merciful back then, I suppose. No more, especially not in Kirkwall. Mages here aren’t what you knew in Tevinter. You should want to help them.” 

“I don’t. As soon as mages are free, they will make themselves magisters. Tevinter is proof of that.” 

“Yes, because the first thing I’ve done since gaining my freedom is buy a bunch of slaves and start using blood magic, of course,” Anders replied. He was stalling, trying to put off telling Fenris the entire truth about Justice. He couldn’t even tell himself that he was trying to win Fenris to his side, because that seemed to be more pointless than flirting with a Chantry sister. 

“Perhaps you are not as free as you think,” Fenris said. He had a tiresome way of making everything he said seem like some kind of weighty, profound declaration, Anders realized, another odd trait for a slave to have. 

“I could say the same about you, you know? You could disappear if you wanted to, I’m sure. You’re as chained by your desire for revenge as you were by your master.” _Well, you would certainly know about vengeance, wouldn’t you?_ Anders said to himself. His own anger had twisted Justice, tainted the bond between them until he wondered if he was actually any better than Fenris or if he was still the old selfish Anders, only thinking of his own wants. 

Fenris’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a snarl, and pale blue light radiating from beneath his collar like the first faint rays of a rising sun stained the tips of his hair and limned the gathered corners of his eyes. “You are only making my decision easier, mage.” 

Anders put his hands up in a placating gesture, though was there any placating someone who seemed more like a mad dog than a man? _They called you a mad dog too,_ he thought, his cheeks flushing again with anger at the memory of Rolan’s nasal voice and at his own hypocrisy, _and you killed them all for it. You proved them right, not that there was anyone left to know it_. “All right. Justice. He had been cut off from the Fade and had been inhabiting the corpse of a Warden. When that body rotted to pieces around him, he needed a new host. A living host. I agreed to help him, and he agreed to help me get justice for the mages of Thedas. Which is a noble and necessary cause, no matter what you might think.” 

“So you are an abomination?” Fenris asked, the musing tone back in his voice. 

“No! And I’m not possessed either. Justice is a part of me now. We’re not separate beings anymore. But why am I even explaining this to you?” He hoisted himself off the cot, trying to ignore the ache in his jaw and his head and almost everywhere else. Healing himself was tempting, but he wanted the cuts on his chin to remain as a reminder. Of what, he wasn’t yet sure. Maybe just to not kiss strange elves in alleys. “I answered your question. Now run off to the templars or do whatever you were going to do.” 

“Do you see yourself as harmless? An abomination who would never harm someone? Is that what you’re trying to prove by healing these people?” The night before, Fenris had slouched when at rest, shoulders rounded forward. Anders could remember, before Justice had taken over, his bowed silhouette in the Chantry, backlit by candlelight gleaming off the giant golden statue of Andraste. Now, though, he sat rigidly upright, alert. 

“I wouldn’t stab my finger into someone’s skull and stir their brain around. Is that the sort of harm you mean?” Maybe he was being unfair – after all, if they’d waited for him to do what Karl had asked, they all would’ve ended up spitted on templar swords – but his head echoed with the heavy thud Karl’s body had made as it hit the floor, like someone had dropped a sack full of turnips. By then, he supposed, it had been just a _thing_ , not really Karl anymore. Though being made Tranquil had done most of that. 

“I did that at the behest of no demon,” Fenris spat. 

“Because I didn’t ask you to do it?” Anders said, guessing from the glare Fenris gave him that the smile he’d attempted had come out as more of a smirk. “Well, at least we can agree that it doesn’t take making a deal with a demon for someone to be a vicious killer. Good.” He stood over Fenris, staring down his nose at him, trying to make use of every last inch of height advantage he had. “Are you satisfied now? If you’re not going to kill me, I have things to do this morning.” 

Fenris tilted his head back to look up at him, one eyebrow raised, that tiny, maddening hint of a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth again. “Do your patients know that you’re an abomination?” 

“No,” Anders snapped, leaving the word as flat and bare as Fenris usually did, but bile started to creep into his throat, his stomach twisting. He had been able to feel himself gradually losing control – it was rather like standing at the shore and watching the tide come in: there was the constant push and pull between him and Justice, like the waves being pulled back out to sea, but even when he managed to control Justice, it felt like he was still losing ground, being flooded, Vengeance constantly rising. And with this, he didn’t think there would be an ebb tide. Once Vengeance overwhelmed him, he would be gone, all sense of Anders left in him eroded. He didn’t fear this just for himself – mostly not for himself, because what did he have left to live for? – but for his patients. What if he lost control while healing and killed one of them on the table? “Being unconscious or in shock or delirious with fever makes it difficult to ask questions.” 

“Would you heal a wounded templar if one was brought to you?” Fenris asked. “Wouldn’t you fear that your _spirit_ would interfere?” 

Anders’s face burned, the acid in his stomach now feeling like it was on the point of boiling, like he was sitting in a cauldron over a blazing fire. _No, I want all the blighted templars dead. Every last one of them_. “I… I’d like to think that –” 

“Would you have healed me if you’d known my… opinions of mages?” Fenris asked before he could work out what to say that would be truthful while keeping Justice quiet. Fenris was definitely smirking now, the Void take him, so proud of his cleverness. Anders could appreciate cleverness as well as anyone, but Fenris’s brand of it seemed particularly unrelenting and, worse, _smug_. “Would your _spirit_ have let you?” Again the brief pause before and slight emphasis on “spirit”, the unspoken “demon” hanging in the air like a wisp. 

“While I do believe that you would still harp on about mages when half-dead, it didn’t really come up because you were unconscious. I can say, though, that I’ve regretted it since.” That old need to be liked, the one that had made him work magic for the other village children, which led to the barn fire that had driven his father to hand him over to the templars, nagged at him, trying to cajole him into smiling to take the sting out of his words. “That’s me, though. Not my _spirit_.” 

Fenris’s only response was a strangely serene grimace, like he’d tried to smile but had forgotten mid-way through how to do it. 

“Do I get to ask a question now?” Anders asked. It wasn’t as if he had anything else to lose, and something had been troubling him since the night before, even through the fog of grief and alcohol, nagging at his conscience like a fleabite unreachable between the shoulder blades. 

“If you must,” Fenris replied in a tone that sounded like Anders had just asked him to hump a nug or clean Kirkwall’s sewers with his tongue. 

“Thank you.” Anders paused, trying to work out how to phrase his question in such a way that wouldn’t make Fenris suspicious, though that was like asking dwarves not to have beards. “Your tattoos… do they… do you…? I mean, what happens when a mage draws on them?” 

“Have you ever had hot needles jabbed under your flesh, again and again?” Fenris asked. The emotionlessness of his voice couldn’t quite conceal the tightly leashed anger in it. 

“The templars usually preferred sword pommels and armored fists, so no, I can’t say that I have,” Anders said, taking a deep breath before plunging on. Apologies weren’t his specialty – with nothing but his convictions, he clung to them, wearing his stubbornness like stone armor. “I hope you won’t assume that I’m just saying this to sway your decision, but I’m sorry that I used the lyrium in them without asking. I know it doesn’t absolve me of anything, but if I had known that doing so caused you pain, I wouldn’t have done it. I was… not thinking clearly last night.” 

“If you think that the physical pain is all that troubles me, you are an even bigger fool than I thought,” Fenris replied. His lyrium-filigreed arms were crossed over his chest, his fingers tapping against the crook of his elbow. It was a wonder that he didn’t spike a vein. 

With a sigh, Anders shook his head and walked toward the storeroom door. He could hear activity in the clinic, voices in the easy rhythm of morning gossip. Lirene must have opened the front doors for him and hung the lamp outside. Heat and the odor of sickness hit him as he swung the door open, but it was preferable to the smell of rat droppings and a brooding elf. 

A few Fereldan women sat around a table, rolling bandages, but the main doors were still bolted. 

“It was quiet, so we thought we’d let you sleep for a bit,” one of the women said with a smile when he stepped out of the storeroom, swinging the door shut behind him. Anders recognized her as the woman who helped out at Lirene’s shop most days. He’d healed her son not a week earlier when the boy had gone down with a fever. He kept to the shadows, hoping the smoke from the lanterns and general dimness of Darktown would conceal the cuts on his face. 

She glanced past him, confusion clouding her eyes, and Anders turned to see Fenris slipping out of the storeroom. “I hope you did sleep some,” she faltered. 

“Oh yes, he’s a patient. He came by early for help with a… sensitive matter and wanted privacy.” He turned to Fenris, whose face was already tightening into a scowl, and said, “You really should be more careful. Next time, save your coin for the Blooming Rose instead of Lowtown, and this won’t happen again.” 

A wave of scarlet swept over Fenris’s face, his markings and hair livid white in comparison, almost glowing, and he started coughing as if he’d accidentally inhaled one of the flies that circled lazily around the piles of bloody bandages on the clinic floor. Anders reached over and thumped him on the back a few times, a little harder than may have been necessary, but one couldn’t be too careful when someone was choking. 

Before Fenris could recover enough to do any organ removal, the bolted front door started to creak and rattle on its hinges from the pounding of fists against the old, half-rotten wood. Anders went to open it, ignoring the little gasps of the Fereldan women when they saw the slashes on his chin, still crusted with blood. Outside was an elvhen man, slighter than Fenris, face white with terror where it wasn’t splashed with dark, drying blood. His knees seemed on the point of buckling under the weight of his burden: the limp, blood-stained body of a young elf girl, slashes in her abdomen and chest gaping like open mouths, her face bruised and swollen as an overripe fruit. 

“Are you the healer?” 

Anders nodded and lunged forward to catch the girl when the man’s legs finally gave way. She was light in his arms, but slack as a doll with its stuffing pulled out. 

“Please, Messere, help my daughter,” the man pleaded, struggling back to his feet. 

“I will do what I can,” Anders said, carrying the girl to the nearest cot and laying her out. “Maker’s breath, what happened to her?” 

“A monster tried to kill her! I carried her all the way from the Wounded Coast myself – none of those shem guards would help me. All they cared about was protecting that animal.” 

Anders passed his hands over the girl, probing the wounds with magic, trying to determine how deep they had gone and what they had cut through. Her chest barely stirred, her heartbeat the faintest flutter, as if a tiny, dying bird were trapped in the cage of her ribs. Lirene’s assistant sidled up to him as he worked, having at least the decency to lower her voice as she picked up her employer’s usual refrain. 

“Don’t you think this one is too far gone? You should save your gift for those deserve it, not these city knife-ears.” 

Behind them, Fenris muttered, “ _Venhedis_ ”, and Anders felt that surge in mana that meant that Fenris’s tattoos would soon be glowing and he’d be punching into whatever flesh was within arm’s reach. As if in answer, Justice stirred within Anders, and he squeezed his eyes shut to hide the spirit’s presence from the women and from Fenris. 

“I will not turn anyone away who needs my help,” he said, hearing the added depth and resonance in his voice that Justice gave it and hoping that no one noticed. “Please, let me do my work.” 

He was conscious of Fenris’s eyes on him as he cast spell after spell, trying to knit together the flesh and organs that had been sliced to ribbons, draw out the poison from the spider bites that pierced even deeper than the steel that had caused the slashes, mend bones that had been smashed by pummeling fists. Justice battered at the defenses Anders had put up against him every time a new injury was revealed, and only the desire to not give Fenris the satisfaction of seeing Justice emerge while he worked on a patient kept Anders in control. 

“Who did this?” Fenris asked. His low voice splintered the silence; Anders flinched at the sound of it, his hands jerking in their smooth movements over the injured girl. Her father winced too, as if jolted from concentrating on watching his daughter’s chest rise and fall with her failing breath. 

“He’s been taking elvhen children for months now, but the guards won’t do anything. There can be no justice for elves in this city.” The man seemed to see Fenris for the first time. “You don’t seem to be from Kirkwall. You should leave here if you can.” 

Anders glanced over his shoulder at Fenris, trying to read his expression, but his head was bowed, his eyes hidden behind a fall of hair. With any luck, he was mulling over leaving Kirkwall. He knew too much, which was entirely Anders’s fault, though it was hard to think up convincing lies on the spot when someone who didn’t want to believe anything you said was threatening to rip your heart out. The only good thing about Fenris’s presence was the lyrium in his markings, singing in Anders’s ears, enticing him to draw from them. He reached out toward the mana, wanting it to seep into him like rain into parched earth. Fenris must have known, but he didn’t protest. Maybe the instinct to be led, to serve, to accept what was done to him was still too strong. Anders felt a stab of something that he would have called regret and almost let go of his connection to the lyrium. Must have been Justice’s influence. 

“Fenris?” he murmured, glancing over his shoulder. At a grudging jerk of a nod from the elf, Anders tapped into the well of mana in Fenris’s tattoos, feeling some of the strain lift from him. 

Soon, all thought of Justice, Fenris, and his own possibly impending death fell away as the work of knitting the elvhen girl’s broken body back together pressed down him. He tried to lean against the cot to prop himself up, since he needed both hands to cast the magic, but that just made his upper body sway back and forth like a spindly tree in a gale. The night before – grief, bruises, cheap brandy, being awakened by an intrusive and violent elf – pressed down on him until he felt as if he were slowly sinking into the ground. Even through the smeary blur of fatigue, he could see that the healing was working – the girl’s cheeks were no longer a fish-belly white, and most of the bruises had faded. He leaned over to check the state of the wounds in her abdomen and felt the world tilt, swoop, the still-unconscious girl’s body rushing up in his vision as he pitched forward. 

Something caught him by the back of his belt and hauled him upright. He let the magic go for a moment and scrubbed his hands over his face, as if he could wipe away his exhaustion like a spill on a table, and with clearer eyes glanced around to see if anyone had noticed his lapse. The girl’s father seemed to be in a daze of his own fear and tiredness, the Fereldan women had scattered, and Fenris…? He darted a quick look over his shoulder and found Fenris right behind him, one gauntleted fist closed around Anders’s belt. He should have known. Fenris’s shoulder, in its spiky pauldron, was pressed against the back of his own, and after a moment, Fenris’s grip on his belt loosened, and his arm draped loosely across Anders’s back, his hand just barely cupping his hip. He gave Fenris a bewildered look, raising an eyebrow – Fenris didn’t seem to like being touched, least of all by a mage. 

“I will keep you upright until you finish the healing, mage,” he murmured, his lips hardly moving as he spoke, and Anders nodded. 

“Thank you,” he said, wishing that nodding hadn’t jostled the whole room around. He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping that when he opened them, everything would have stopped moving. 

“I’m not doing it for you.” 

Anders let out a short laugh that sounded more like a yelp to his ears. “Of course not. Someday I’ll have to fool you into doing something for me just so I can actually thank you,” he said, hoping Fenris could hear the sarcasm in his voice – Fenris seemed to understand sarcasm, at least – and wishing he didn’t enjoy the stripe of warmth Fenris’s arm left across his back as much as he did. Even though he worked with people all day long, he’d gotten out of the habit of being touched. It had been a slow progression that had started when Karl had been sent away to the Kirkwall Circle and gathered speed in the long months when he’d been locked alone in the tower, desperate to the point of wishing that his templar jailers’ fingers would accidentally brush his on the rare occasions when they handed him his food or unlocked his chains so he could use the privy. Some days he had thought that even being beaten with bare fists instead of armored ones or sword pommels would be like a caress from the Maker himself. 

“My arm is getting tired, so perhaps you should make haste,” Fenris muttered. 

Anders doubted very much that was true, but he turned his attention fully back to his patient like a horse with blinders on, Fenris, Justice, the girl’s father fading from his thoughts. All that was real was his connection to the Fade, the song of Fenris’s lyrium markings chanting in his ears, and the methodical casting of spells. He was distantly aware of Fenris’s hand tightening on his hip, of numbness rising through his legs as if he were standing on ice, of his eyelids becoming harder and harder to lift. And then he felt himself falling, a headlong pitch, but then something seemed to catch him under the arms and his fall became a gradual one, like a feather rocking back and forth on currents of air before finally settling on the ground. 

When he awoke, Fenris was gone, and the elf girl breathed the slow, regular breath of a sleep as deep as the one he had just stirred from.


	4. Chapter 4

He could almost believe Danarius had given up the chase. It had been months since he’d seen the dried-blood maroon color that Tevinter soldiers wore, and though he’d frequently come across slavers in Kirkwall, none of them had seemed to recognize him before he’d torn out their hearts. He had made the mistake of being complacent before, though, and he wouldn’t make it again. Danarius had always said he was predictable, always phrasing it as some failing of Fenris’s, even though Danarius had molded him into what he was after the pain of having lyrium etched into his flesh had wiped away his memory. Of course a master would want a predictable slave, a slave whose daily rhythm fell easily into his master’s patterns. Even if he felt safe enough to live as his own man, he wasn’t sure if he could – without his memories, he was still Danarius’s creation. The thought gnawed at him night and day, like a rat worrying at a corpse.

From what Fenris could tell, free men were governed by three motivations: need, obligation, and want. He understood the first two well enough – if need had meant nothing to him, Hadriana’s tortures wouldn’t have worked half as well as they had, and what was a slave’s life but a series of obligations? It was wanting that confounded him. For a slave, what a free man would consider a need often became a want, the basics of life an unreliable luxury that could be snatched away at any time. It had even taken him years to _want_ to escape. 

And yet when he believed he understood need, obligation, and want, he thought of Anders and got confused all over again. He thought of the mage unwillingly, of course, but he had to admit that Anders was the free man he knew the most after Danarius, and he tried to think of his former master as little as possible, unless it was to dream of slashing the man’s throat open with a swipe of his hand. Anders seemed to live outside those categories as much as he lived outside of society, and in that, if nothing else, Fenris – again unwillingly, with a bitter taste curdling on his tongue – realized that they were alike. Neither of them had a real place anywhere, Anders seemingly by choice and Fenris because the magisters had robbed him of it along with his memory. 

But beyond that, the lines between need, obligation, and want were blurred in Anders, maybe because of his possession by the “spirit” that must have had its own set of needs, obligations, and wants. It seemed that he cared little for his needs, his health, his safety, and instead was consumed by obligation to his patients, the refugees, the Circle mages, his now-dead friend. Did Anders want anything for himself? He’d mentioned freedom, which Fenris grudgingly understood even if he didn’t think mages deserved it, but it had seemed more abstract, an ideal that he wanted for others more even than for himself, a dream that would take years to achieve, if it ever was. What did Anders _want_ , on a day-to-day level? Fenris puzzled over it, in the long days waiting for night to fall and the slavers to come out, even though he was sure that Anders’s was not an existence he wanted to model his own on. He told himself that knowing someone’s motivations made it easier to anticipate their behavior, easier to stay ahead of them, easier to hurt them when you had to. It had been so much easier in Tevinter – Danarius, Hadriana, and the other magisters wanted power, pleasure, and the fear and admiration of others. But Anders? 

Though who could tell with mages? If they wanted something, they could just use their magic to attain it, and if that failed, they could easily turn to blood magic or enter into a pact with a demon. That was what had happened with the Tevinter magisters, he thought – they could obtain anything they wanted with their magic and so were perpetually bored and unimpressed by the world, needing greater and greater – and more and more repulsive – entertainments to satisfy themselves. Life to them must have been like a faded old tunic, bleached and threadbare with too many washings. 

Curiosity was a new experience for him. Curiosity usually did not end well for slaves. But he wasn’t a slave anymore, and he had to fill the hours between mercenary jobs somehow. He’d given up pacing back and forth outside of the mansion in Hightown, because it had become clear that Danarius was not there, not because his hand shook so badly that he couldn’t manage the latch on the door. Now he found himself wandering through Kirkwall, making concentric circles that seemed to center on Darktown. He only got close enough to Anders’s clinic to catch a glimpse of the warm glow of the lantern out front, a bright smudge in the haze of chokedamp and sewer gas. Anders himself rarely emerged from the large, half-rotten wooden doors, though a steady stream of Fereldan refugee women seemed to come and go like a troop of busy ants. He told himself that he was just keeping an eye on Anders to make sure he didn’t give in to his “spirit” and wipe out half of the Undercity, to reassure himself that he’d made the right choice in letting Anders live. 

Then one night, the door to the clinic swung open and Anders himself stepped out. For someone who was supposedly in hiding, he didn’t take much care to disguise himself or the fact that he was a mage. Fenris hadn’t taken his advice and gotten a cloak either, but something about his markings made it easier for him to go unnoticed by others – rather than catching the eyes of passersby, they seemed to envelop him in an invisible fog. Elves were common enough in Kirkwall that they didn’t attract stares, but he knew he didn’t look like the city elves in their short pants that were more suited for children, and he couldn’t pass for Dalish either. It was a relief when people’s eyes slipped past him, not least because the inhabitants of Darktown were often petty criminals or drunks or just saw an elf with a sword as an opportunity to practice their rather pathetic fighting skills. There was little satisfaction or point in striking down a pauper who lived in a slum that stank of sewage night and day. 

The stairways that were little more than haphazard piles of wooden planks creaked under Anders’s boots as he climbed them, but Fenris was lighter on his feet, and even the most rickety steps didn’t make a sound as he shadowed Anders through Darktown. The Undercity had been carved from the bedrock beneath Kirkwall, but to Fenris, it seemed likely to go up in an instant blaze at the touch of a stray ember. He couldn’t say it would be much of a loss if it did. He was glad when they emerged from the clouds of chokedamp into the salt-scrubbed air of Hightown. 

Fenris knew Hightown well enough to recognize the shadowy corners of the Red Lantern District, and as he watched Anders push open the door to the Blooming Rose, he wondered what a man without a copper to his name would be doing at the finest brothel in the city. He understood brothels, could even understand the allure of them, but it came too close to slavery for him to want to follow Anders inside, to see bodies being used, forced to do things they wouldn’t necessarily have chosen for themselves. Instead he slunk into a poorly lit corner behind a column and perched on a crate with a view of the front door, hoping that the City Guards would pass him by on their circuits through the area. 

The moon had sunk out of sight behind the high stone walls of the Red Lantern District by the time Anders reappeared, looking remarkably neat for someone who had presumably been enjoying the services of Kirkwall’s best whores for the past few hours. He looked tired, yes, but it was that usual look of almost paralyzing fatigue that was a disease itself rather than a symptom, not the satisfied, self-pleased tiredness Fenris remembered on the faces of the guests at Danarius’s more debauched parties. Anders had told him the morning after the failed rescue of his friend that he had been a Grey Warden for a time, and from what Fenris had heard of the Wardens, he doubted even the best whore in all of Thedas could have worn one out this thoroughly. 

Whatever Anders had been doing in there, Fenris doubted it had involved sampling the merchandise. Not that he cared what Anders got up to, short of making deals with demons or doing blood magic; it just seemed… dishonest to spend money on women – or men? – when you pretended to care about the plight of starving refugees. That nagging voice in his head stirred and began to insinuate that maybe he was hoping to have finally found a mage who wasn’t completely self-serving and power-hungry, who wasn’t willing to use the bodies of others for their games and perversions. But no, that was impossible and ridiculous – he need look no further than the marks on his skin, than his own life, or rather the empty hole where his life should have been, to know that magic did and always would taint everything it touched. Maybe Anders hadn’t asked to be born a mage, but he had willingly agreed to become a host to his _spirit_ friend, and he had chosen to become an apostate. 

Fenris slid off the crate he’d been sitting on and hurried after Anders before the mage stepped out of the rosy glow of the Red Lantern District and was swallowed by the shadows of the sleeping Hightown. The streets were even more silent now, but Anders still seemed unaware that he was being followed – his feet seemed to drag so much that Fenris would have to stop and wait a few seconds so as not to overtake him, and he walked with his head bowed, one hand worrying at his brow. 

He should have been paying more attention – not for Anders’s sake, he wasn’t the man’s keeper – for even he could have ended on the point of a thug’s dagger if caught unawares. He’d seen the gangs of mercenaries in Lowtown leaping down from scaffolds and window ledges onto passersby like cormorants swooping into the bay at Minrathous for their prey, but he’d never thought to look up in Hightown. Surely the nobility could expect some measure of safety on their streets, couldn’t they? In Tevinter, the only people the magisters had to fear on the streets at night were their own peers. 

His first thought, as the dark shapes of men unfurled like banners from the stone balconies above, was that Danarius had finally set his hounds hunting again. Something bubbled up within him – was it excitement? Anticipation? Perhaps there was safety in Danarius giving up, but there was no chance of vengeance if he did – Danarius was still in control even in his absence, still making all the decisions. But then one of the men broke his fall by knocking Anders to the ground, and another smashed the pommel of his dagger into Anders’s temple. Fenris saw no maroon cloak of the Tevinter guard, and their voices were rough with the accent of Kirkwall’s Lowtown. He doubted they’d even noticed him, trailing Anders a few paces back, and felt a brief prick of disappointment. How long would he have to wait to sink his hand into Danarius’s chest and watch the life gutter from his eyes? How many more years would he lose? 

“Quick! Tie his hands! They can’t do anything when their hands are tied,” one of the thugs shouted. 

Fenris expected Anders to struggle, for those eddies of blue flame into swirl into his eyes, for that other voice to start clamoring about justice, but Anders lay sprawled on the paving stones, crumpled and limp as wet parchment, not even groaning when a boot was driven into his ribs. Fenris reached over his shoulder for his sword, slowly, hesitating even as he knew he should help – that Anders, do-gooder that he was, would have done the same. At the very least, it wasn’t a fair fight, four against one. It would have been if Anders had been awake, a more than fair fight – were there any fair fights between mages and non-mages? 

“Not too rough now. The templars will only pay for live mages,” one of the men warned his companions, who were pummeling Anders as if they had a personal grudge against him. “If you daft bastards kill this one, that’ll be my share of the fifty sovereigns you’ll owe me.” 

With that, Fenris’s hand closed around the pommel of his sword, decisive now. He didn’t know much about the templars – in Tevinter, the Chantry was run by the magisters, and the templars had no place there beyond enforcing the whims of the magisters in power – but if they wanted Anders, they should have taken him themselves, not had him be trussed up and sold to them like chattel by common street toughs. 

His markings flared alight, filling the dark street with their blue glow, and he rushed forward, catching one of the mercenaries with the first swing of his sword. His blade sliced through the man’s collarbone and sheared him open with one clean strike. The man fell at Fenris’s feet, his dying cry spilling across the paving stones along with his entrails, but Fenris leaped over him easily, already focused on the fellow who was still foolishly trying to wrap the rope around Anders’s ankles. The other two mercenaries lunged at him instead of fleeing, their eyes wide and wild, as he would have expected, and that was when he knew – before he’d even heard the distant pound of footsteps on the paving stones – that more were coming. He gutted one with his sword while tearing out the other’s throat. The fleshy thud of their bodies hitting the ground behind him was almost drowned out by the terrified babbling of the last mercenary. The man’s face was dead white in the pale gleam of Fenris’s markings, and Fenris could just make out the spreading, darkening patch on his crotch. 

“You might wish to reconsider your line of work,” Fenris said, smashing the pommel of his sword down onto the crown of the man’s head. The satisfying crunch of bone drifted to his ears as the man sank into a boneless pile along with the rope he’d been fumbling with. 

The sound of boots grew closer, ringing and echoing now among the stone walls and streets of Hightown so they seemed to be coming from every direction. Anders was still sprawled out on the ground, blood blackening the tawny hair above his left ear and reaching dark, spindly fingers down one cheek. A purple-brown continent of bruise was already mapped on the high plane of his cheekbone. Fenris hesitated a moment. _Fifty sovereigns_ , he thought, imagining the gold pieces lined up before him, overlapping like dragon scales. What could he do with fifty sovereigns? Hire mercenaries to root Danarius out of the Hightown mansion, for a start. He swept the thought away, almost hearing the tinkle of gold pieces hitting the ground. He couldn’t. He couldn’t become what he’d fought so hard to escape from, even in the slightest. 

Fenris cursed under his breath and stooped to try to gather the mage up somehow. Anders’s head lolled on his neck, and Fenris would have thought he was dead if he hadn’t let out a little grunt of pain when Fenris hoisted him over his shoulder and his spiked pauldrons poked him in the gut. Anders was lighter than he’d expected, but he still had a few inches on Fenris and seemed to be all limb, shoulder, and heavy ribcage at the moment, like a half-starved calf with all its bones prominent under the skin. He groaned again as Fenris shifted his weight, a warm puff of breath against the back of Fenris’s arm. Still, that meant nothing. The body could still react even when all reason had been taken from it, especially with blows to the head. 

He wouldn’t make it back down the wide, winding stairs to Darktown with Anders thrown over his shoulder like a sack of grain, especially not with a band of mercenaries following him who knew the city better than he did and who could break into smaller parties to head him off. The Chantry might have been a safe haven, but he didn’t relish the thought of hauling Anders up all those stairs either. The only place he knew well in Hightown was a house he’d never even seen the inside of – Danarius’s mansion. But what if he dragged an unconscious Anders all the way there and then lost his nerve? _Then both of us will die_ , he told himself, and hitching Anders higher on his shoulder, he lumbered into the shadows and headed toward the mansion. 

The streetlamp caught the silvery threads of spider’s webs stretched across the door to the mansion, and a few stray tendrils of ivy had even begun to choke the little vestibule where he dumped Anders. The mansion appeared uninhabited… but he had heard that many Hightown mansions had cellars that plunged down all the way to Darktown, deep roots that slavers and smugglers used to sneak cargo – living and otherwise – in and out of Kirkwall. Danarius, as grandiose and flamboyant as he could be, wouldn’t be above scurrying through dusty cellars like a rat if it got him what he wanted. 

His hand trembled as he opened the door, his gauntlets rattling against the metal of the latch. Inside, it was dark, the air fetid with the stench of dry rot and decay. Dust rained down from the ceiling in drifts, more spun in the air. The door opened onto what seemed to be some kind of storeroom rather than a proper entry hall – crates were shoved into corners, and overturned tables were strewn about as if a flood had washed through the house, toppling everything in its wake. The creak of the door pierced the silence, which was so profound it seemed to be a noise in itself, like the sound of air drafts moving in an empty cave, a sort of hollow sigh. 

He grasped Anders’s wrists and dragged him into the room, the mage’s head still rolling loosely on his neck. The thump of Anders’s limp arms as they hit the floor when he released them kicked up puffs of dirt and dust. Fenris pulled one of the crates across the door to block it – there might be danger within the house, but he was certain there was danger outside of it – and propped Anders up against it. 

Crouching over him, he stared into the mage’s face, grainy and indistinct in the darkness, as if he could will Anders to wake up, trying to ignore the pricking up of the hair on the back of his neck, stirred by having a door concealing Maker knew what behind him and the faint crackle of magic in the air. That could have been coming from Anders, he supposed. He was aware of Anders’s breathing more than anything else, the slow, comfortable breath of sleep. At least Anders wasn’t crying out and twitching in his sleep the way he had been in his clinic the morning after they had gone to the Chantry to rescue his friend. Fenris reached down and thumbed open one of Anders’s eyes. A black disc stared back at him unseeing, a saucer of ink swallowing the brown. 

“Can’t mages heal themselves?” he muttered, letting Anders’s eyelid sink shut again, knowing even as he said it that it was an absurd idea, especially considering that Anders was still unconscious. Without thinking, he ran the backs of his fingers along the scars on the mage’s cheek – scars that he had made. They were healed now, like white, crooked but tidily sewn seams. Through the metal of his gauntlets, he was only aware of the rasp of Anders’s stubble, but still he felt his face grow hot and quickly snatched his hand away. _Touching his face woke him up last time_ , he said to himself, as if to explain it away. He pushed himself to his feet and began pacing the room like a caged tiger. 

“Where are you, _Master_?” he shouted, loud enough to rattle the door that led deeper into the mansion and send another cascade of dust from the rafters. “Danarius! Show yourself!” 

“Andraste’s damp gusset, must you shout like that?” 

Fenris whirled around to find Anders trying to push himself upright with one hand as he rubbed his blood-stained temple with the other. “You’re awake.” 

“Yes, possibly because of all your bellowing. Why do you always seem to be around when I wake up feeling like I’ve been headbutted by a Qunari?” Anders asked. Fenris could hear the smile in his voice; the mage was a strange man – moody and sullen one moment, teasing and sarcastic the next. 

“You were attacked outside the Blooming Rose,” Fenris explained, the question of why Anders had been there teetering on the tip of his tongue. “I… happened to be passing by and intervened.” 

Anders let out a short, sharp bark of laughter. “’Happened to be passing by’, were you?” He shook his head as if in disbelief. “You really should have taken my advice about the cloak.” 

“You mean you _knew_ I was foll—knew I was there the whole time?” Fenris asked, thankful for the darkness when he felt himself blushing. He’d thought he had been so careful. 

“It couldn’t have always been coincidence,” Anders pointed out. “But since you didn’t seem like you were going to disembowel me in the middle of the Hightown Marketplace, it was almost… comforting in a way.” 

“That was not my intention,” Fenris muttered. His face, if anything, felt hotter; he wouldn’t have been surprised if Anders could see it glowing red in the dark. 

“I didn’t think it was,” Anders replied. Fenris could see his hand dart up to his temple like a pale moth in the dimness and then heard a pained hiss as Anders touched the wound there. “Nothing seems to be broken,” he said, holding his bloody fingers in front of his eyes. “Did you see who they were?” 

“Lowtown refuse. They were going to sell you to the templars for fifty gold sovereigns.” 

Anders laughed, a warm, somehow golden sound, like the jingle of the sovereigns he would have been exchanged for. The noise skittered through the quiet room before a short groan of pain chased it away. “Fifty? I must be coming up in the world. Maybe you should have helped them instead.” Fenris went very still, as if by not responding or even moving he wouldn’t give anything away, wouldn’t reveal the shameful fact that he _had_ considered it, however briefly. Anders paused for a moment, turning his face in Fenris’s direction. Then he signed and said, “Thank you. I _can_ thank you for this, can’t I? You did do it just to help me, right?” 

The mage was teasing him again, Fenris knew, and so he bit back the litany of excuses he’d come up with: honor, justice, abhorrence of flesh – even that of a mage – being sold for coin. “If you must,” he said finally. 

“Thank you, then,” Anders said. Fenris heard the scrabble of heels on the ground as Anders tried to get to his feet. Dust fountained up in plumes from the rotting carpet as he sat down hard against the crate. “Maker, my bruises have bruises. I don’t suppose you invested in that poultice you wanted? I could buy it off you.” He fumbled around at his belt. “Those bastards robbed me!” 

“You actually had coin?” Fenris asked, raising an eyebrow. With his stained, hole-riddled clothing and his worn boots, the mage didn’t seem to be exactly flush with money. 

“Yes, briefly,” Anders replied, his voice sour. “I help the companions at the Blooming Rose – potions, healing, that sort of thing – and Madam Lusine pays me. She’d rather pay in some other currency, but I’ve seen too much there to go for anything like that.” 

Fenris ducked his head, feeling even the tips of his ears heat up along with his cheeks. “You cannot heal yourself?” he suggested. 

Anders shook his head and muttered a pained curse under his breath, pressing a hand to his forehead. “I’m afraid the ladies at the Blooming Rose wore me out,” he said. 

Fenris could tell he was trying to make a joke – Anders always tried to brighten his voice when he was saying something he thought was funny – but he could hear a tightness as well, the all-too-familiar tightness of hidden pain, a willful rejection of fatigue and injury. He rummaged through his belt pouch. “Here,” he said, handing Anders a potion. “You don’t have to pay me for it, but I will ask a favor.” 

Anders hesitated, the cork still stuck halfway into the potion bottle, and Fenris could sense the mage’s eyes on him. “We have quite the barter economy going,” he said. “I suppose I should ask what the favor is before I drink this, shouldn’t I?” 

“This mansion belongs to my former master, or at least that is what he would have me believe.” He crossed the room and sat on the crate that Anders leaned against. He felt Anders turn toward him slightly, a kind of quivery nervous tension radiating from the mage, like a rabbit that had scented a fox. “I ask that you help me find him, if he is still here, and… watch my back while I finally tear out his heart.” 

There was no answer but the sound of a bottle being uncorked, a few gulps, and the wet smack of Anders’s lips. “Well, as long as we’re here, we might as well get to it, then,” he said.


	5. Chapter 5

If his bruises had had bruises before, now he felt like his bruises’ bruises had bruises. It was most likely pointless to hope that Fenris would have another potion on him, not that he knew where Fenris was anyway. The elf, spattered with ethereal scoria and his own blood, had replied to Anders’s cheerful “Well, we won,” by muttering something about needing air and disappeared as soon as they’d finished off the Arcane Horror that his master had left in the house as a nasty surprise for intruders. Shades and Arcane Horrors were nothing new to Anders after the Deep Roads, but he could have gone the rest of his life without hearing their screeching again. They made the taint in his blood hum when they were near, a useful warning in the Deep Roads, perhaps, but here in Kirkwall, it was an unwelcome reminder that he’d never truly be free. As if he needed any more of those.

He thought he’d done a respectable job of fighting, though his muscles burned with fatigue much quicker than they once had. Too many days going without food, handing his own meager ration of bread or gruel to whatever under-nourished refugee child happened to be nearby, staring at him with huge, hungry eyes, when Justice started to grumble louder than his stomach. Maybe he would have to scrape together a few coppers and get a bowl of stew from the Hanged Man. He’d just have to not think about what was in it and how few cats he’d seen in the streets of Lowtown of late. Fenris, on the other hand, had fought like he was the one possessed by an avenging spirit rather than Anders, throwing himself into mobs of shades that washed over him like a dark tide, only to burst free, yelling for his master to show himself. It had been a delicate balancing act to heal Fenris when he called out for it – which, to Anders’s surprise, he had, often – and keep up his end of the fighting. 

The mansion’s long halls rang with his footsteps as he wandered through them, as if the walls were being struck like a gong, and every room he poked his head into was full of rubbish, corpses, old turned-over furniture, books lying open on the floor like dead birds. He thought about stealing an hour of sleep in one of the tousled beds, but the pillows stank of mold and when he’d pulled back the blanket, beetles had skittered everywhere. If he’d wanted that kind of sleeping arrangement, he could have just gone back to his clinic. 

Which he was considering, since Fenris still hadn’t returned. Perhaps he’d given up. Perhaps he’d been driven mad by having his vengeance thwarted and had gone to the docks to catch the next ship to Minrathous. Anders had been through the whole house, from the vast attic with generations of bird’s nests in the rafters to the cellars where he’d been hoping to find a basement entrance from Darktown. There was a bolted, padlocked door, but he didn’t have the mana to break the lock with magic or the will to brush away the many generations of spiders who had built their webs across doorway and try to force open the lock by hand. Other than that, he’d only found more corpses and some dusty bottles of wine. He’d taken a few of those – he could manage a few sips before Justice interfered, and perhaps he could sell the rest. 

The light slanting in the windows was the pale, uncertain light of morning that always seemed hesitant to touch Kirkwall with its rays. Soon, it would be bright enough out that he could head back to the clinic without having to worry quite as much about being attacked – and given that Fenris wouldn’t be following him, it _was_ a worry. He’d only been sure that Fenris had been tailing him that night on the way to the Blooming Rose, but judging from the embarrassment that shot through the elf’s voice when he’d mentioned it, Anders assumed Fenris had dogged his heels through Kirkwall more than once. But why? To make sure he didn’t randomly turn into an abomination in the Gallows Courtyard and start murdering templars? To work up the courage to ask Anders for help finding his master? Boredom? 

Anders wrenched the front door open, wincing as the squeal of its hinges pierced the silence of the Hightown morning, and stepped into the ivy-wreathed stone vestibule. The shadows were still long and blue – his own stretched far before him, and for a moment, he imagined it wasn’t his at all, but the immense shadow cast by Justice – and the air was cool and quiet, full of rustling leaves, sleepily twittering birds, crickets determined to play their song until the heat of the sun drove them to silence. He’d grown accustomed to the clamor of Darktown to the point that he noticed it even less than he noticed the smell, and he realized that it drowned out the other voices trying to out-shout one another in his head. 

He was so preoccupied by listening to nothing that he didn’t notice the other shadow sprawling loose-limbed across the courtyard. Fenris leaned against a pillar near the front entrance, one knee bent so the sole of his foot pressed flat on the stone behind. The pose might have had an air of insouciance about it, but Anders knew that any sign of ease in Fenris was as misleading as a cat napping on its back – if you took the opportunity to scratch its belly, you would come away with a bloody hand, and if you thought Fenris had let his guard down, you would come away with much worse. A blood-spurting stump, maybe. Even slouched against a wall with a face like a slapped arse, the elf never seemed more than an eye-blink away from extreme violence. A fine trait in a bodyguard, Anders was sure. Hearing the faint lilt of the lyrium, he understood for a moment why Fenris’s master was so determined to reclaim him. 

Fenris didn’t acknowledge him with anything more than a flick of an eye in his direction, so Anders uncorked one of the wine bottles, took a sip, and offered it to him. 

“Here, you look like you need this more than I do.” Fenris took the bottle, looking at the label as if it had a map leading directly to his master drawn on it. “It’s Agreggio,” Anders said. “Quite good, apparently. It’s what all the most well-heeled patrons at the Blooming Rose drink. Or they drink something out of bottles marked as Agreggio anyway.” 

The tattoos on Fenris’s throat undulated as he threw his head back to drink – the branched markings looked like a ribcage swelling and shrinking with breath. He wiped his lips on the palm of his hand and seemed about to hand the bottle back to Anders but then appeared to change his mind, clutching the neck of it between two fingers as if trying to throttle it. 

“Are you… all right?” Anders asked, not that he thought for a moment that Fenris would confide him. “Do you need healing?” 

“No.” His voice was as flat and cold as Anders had ever heard it, like a piece of slate left on top of Sundermount in winter. He wasn’t quite sure which question Fenris was answering, maybe both, but he didn’t press the issue. Fenris would ask for healing if he needed it, he’d made that much clear. “It never ends.” 

“But he wasn’t here. Perhaps he’s given up, decided you’re not worth the expense anymore?” 

Fenris waved one gauntleted hand dismissively. Anders saw the morning sun glint off of teeth bared in a sneer. “Not Danarius. I have no doubt that I will see him again. He does not take kindly to losing his _property_ , and this lyrium in my skin is more precious to him than gold dust.” He shook his head, almost more of a shudder, just enough to make the locks of hair that had fallen in front of his eyes sway. “That is not what I meant. It is magic. I escaped a land of dark magic only to have Danarius send his spirits here to do his fighting for him. I have no wish to die, but sometimes it seems that I will only be free of magic when Danarius finally gets his wish and takes my skin.” 

“You know, magic isn’t _all_ bad. It did heal you several times.” That earned him a sidelong glare from Fenris, a quick, angry cut of gold-tinged green in his direction. “I’m not saying that you’re entirely in the clear – you know this Danarius fellow and I don’t – but you can’t live your entire life waiting for him to turn up. You can be wary, of course, like I am with the templars, but you can… live.” 

In one fluid movement, Fenris pushed away from the wall and hurled the bottle of wine past Anders’s head, so close that the breeze it created riffled his hair. The bottle smashed against the wall behind him, the glass raining down and hitting the pavement like the ringing of tiny bells in the sudden silence. “You know nothing of what it is to be a slave, _mage_. You have no idea how completely magic has tainted my life, no concept of the tortures it has caused me.” 

Anders took a step back from the rage contorting Fenris’s face, but his own words were echoing in his ears: “… _like I am with the templars_ …” His breath tangled in his throat, and for a moment, he felt like he was staring into a pool of dark water, seeing his own uncertain reflection on the surface, dim, distorted, but the same. “Maybe I do know something of what it is to be a slave,” he managed finally. 

Fenris’s scowl deepened, his black brows cinching together, and Anders put his hands up – whether as a placating gesture or to fend him off, he wasn’t sure – and stuttered out, tongue tripping over the words in his haste to say them, “Not a slave, maybe. But something similar. The Circles in southern Thedas aren’t anything like Tevinter. It’s not a privilege. It’s a life with no choices, where you live on the sufferance of the templars, constantly watched, sometimes threatened with being made Tranquil. We may not be slaves, but we are not free either.” 

Fenris seemed to hesitate a moment, a faint pout that was somehow thoughtful rather than petulant, crossing his face, but then shook his head. “It is not the same. The Circle is for the protection of others. Who was protected by my being a slave?” 

The elf’s words were like stones thrown into that pool of dark water, scattering any reflection Anders might have seen. “But you can’t possibly believe that! Who was protected by my being taken from my family when I was a child?” The taste of ash coated his tongue – he tried to swallow it down, but it clung, claggy, choking – and the long-ago smell of charred wood and burning straw filled his nostrils. For a moment, he was back in his village in Ferelden, twelve years old, the dying flames from the barn that had so unexpectedly blazed alight still flickering, casting jumpy shadows on his parents’ faces and licking the burnished breastplates of the templars. And again, that tightly furled bud of doubt bloomed in him, that doubt that whispered that maybe his village _did_ need to be protected from him. Justice surging up like floodwater was almost a relief. He had to struggle to suppress the spirit – going all fire-eyed and echo-voiced now would only confirm Fenris’s beliefs – but at least that battle for control was a distraction. 

“If being in the Circle didn’t keep you from becoming an abomination, I shudder to think what would have happened if you’d run free all those years,” Fenris said, his voice as dry as old kindling. 

“One thing is certain – if I _had_ been free, I would never have chosen to come to this blighted city, and you would have bled to death in a Lowtown alley. So maybe the world would actually have been better off.” Anders leaned and carefully set the other bottle of Agreggio he’d taken from the cellar down by Fenris’s feet. He didn’t want Fenris coming round the clinic, claiming that he’d stolen from him, after all. He didn’t want to owe Fenris anything. The morning sun shining through the bottle’s dark glass and the red wine cast a murky, deep red light that lapped at the elf’s bare toes. He straightened slowly, as if it were a luxuriant stretch upon waking, and looked Fenris in the eye, so he could see that it was Anders himself speaking and not Justice. He hadn’t lost control. He wouldn’t. “Life isn’t much more than a series of choices, Fenris, and you seem to be stuck on the first one you ever made. You’ll get the hang of it eventually.” 

This time, he didn’t even flinch when the bottle flew past his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter is so short, but the next few updates will be much longer! Thank you for reading!


	6. Chapter 6

Fenris wasn’t sure what choices he’d made for him to end up soaked in blood that was partly his own, guiding a small crowd of mages like a mother duck leading her ducklings through the Warehouse District in the middle of the night, but he was sure that he regretted every one of them. Especially the latest, which had resulted in him carrying the smallest mage, who couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old and who clung to him like a lamprey, small tear-and-snot-slick face pressed against his neck, knee digging into the wound in his side. Several of the others were also children of various sizes – it was hard for him to tell exactly how old humans were – but even the ones he was certain were adults acted like children, as if everything frightened them, even things that weren’t frightening at all, like the slap of waves against the sea wall or a drunk singing a bawdy song while pissing in an alley. He remembered something that Anders – _the abomination_ , he mentally corrected himself – had said the last time he’d seen him, how Circle mages were locked away for most of their lives, always watched, not permitted to do anything for themselves. At the time, he’d dismissed it, for hadn’t he lived something similar, but worse?

Maybe ignoring everything the mage had told him had been the first of his regrettable choices somehow. Certainly the first in a series. He hadn’t seen Anders since that morning at the mansion, and he hadn’t heard anything about an abomination laying waste to Darktown, seen no plumes of smoke and heard no screams of terror rising from the Undercity to taint the pristine air of Hightown, so he assumed that Anders had just gone back to his shoddy, filthy clinic to heal the sick and wallow in his self-pity. Fenris, for his part, had made another poor choice and spent a few weeks drinking his way through several shelves of the Agreggio. Eventually even drunkenness stopped being a comfort or even a refuge from his own thoughts, and he’d ventured out into Kirkwall, always at night, telling himself that the best mercenary jobs would be offered by people who made the night their home. Definitely not because if Danarius _did_ return to the mansion, it would undoubtedly be at night, and not because he’d woken up, throat tight, from dreams of Danarius rising through the floorboards like a rage demon and appearing at the end of his bed. 

It hadn’t taken long for him to realize that Kirkwall being in the Free Marches didn’t mean that it wasn’t infested with slavers. Each one he killed, he pulled the mask off – bloody cowards – and memorized the dead face behind it, even though whoever had first enslaved his family must have been long dead and he wouldn’t have recognized the man anyway. The pain of having the lyrium burned into his flesh had scoured his memory so that he wouldn’t have known his own mother if she’d been behind a slaver’s mask. 

One thing Fenris learned during those long nights of fighting in warehouses, on docks, in alleys, was that though he didn’t fear death, he did fear being enslaved again – he would have much rather felt a swordpoint at his throat or an arrow through his gut than a whip across his back or a manacle around his wrist. As smudged as his memory was, he could remember that that hadn’t always been the case. He would have escaped Danarius long before – or died in the attempt – if it had been. 

He’d never shepherded any of the slaves he’d freed away from the docks before – they tended to dissipate into the Kirkwall night like an exhalation of breath as soon as he’d given them a few coppers. Most of them were refugees, people who wouldn’t be missed, people who had been so dulled by the dangers of their everyday lives that being kidnapped by slavers was just another event to be gotten through. Fenris knew what that numbness was like, that wrapping up of one’s hopes, feelings, thoughts to be put away until they were needed, as if they were the precious vases and figurines that he’d cocooned in silk and sawdust to keep from breaking when Danarius had moved to a bigger estate. He remembered one year in Tevinter when it had been strangely cold, and the fish pond in Danarius’s courtyard had frozen over, suspending the tiny fish in ice. He’d watched as it had happened; the flicks of their fins had grown more sluggish until they’d just stopped and hung there, immobile as stars in the dark water. Another slave, a girl who had been taken from someplace where snow fell steadily for months out of the year, told him that when the water thawed, the fish would wake up again and swim away as if nothing had happened, never realizing that they had missed days or weeks of their lives. He had often wondered when he would wake up and slip into the current of life. 

Though if rescuing wayward mages was the current of life, he might have taken his chances with being frozen again. He knew that there were often mages among the slaves in Tevinter, but in Kirkwall, he had believed the mages were either too well-protected or too well-hidden for slavers to reach them. And yet he’d found a hold full of them, most cowering in their strange hoods and robes, some hurling balls of flame at their captors, a few lying dead on the slippery planks of the pier. He felt himself teetering, unbalanced, in a way that had nothing to do with standing on the deck of a ship. Mages needed to be contained to prevent the rise of another Imperium, to protect the rest of the world from their power, but no matter what Anders seemed to believe, slavery and imprisonment were not the same. Worse, these mages would be sold in Tevinter to magisters trying to bolster their own standing by flaunting their powerful slaves. The whole system was like a giant snake forever eating its own tail, and though he doubted he’d ever be able to slay that serpent on his own, he could at least try to maim it. He leaned down and reached into the hold, the mages shying away from his gauntleted hand like spooked deer. 

“I am trying to rescue you,” he said, not making much effort to hide the impatience in his voice. His own blood was seeping hot through his fingers – there had been an assassin among the slavers, a man who disappeared like smoke, and even Fenris hadn’t been quick enough to avoid the sting of his daggers. Fenris knew he must have looked odd to the young mages with his markings, especially since they must have lived very cloistered lives, but surely he didn’t look like one of the slavers twitching in their death throes in the warehouse, did he? 

Finally someone grasped his hand and clambered up onto the deck next to him, a slim, lanky girl with a long, bony face and startled-looking green eyes. “Thank you, Messere,” she said, her voice soft, wispy, as if she were out of breath. “They were about to cast off before you appeared. I… I don’t know what we would have done.” She brushed the tips of her long fingers against the small knife at her belt as if unaware of what she was doing, and Fenris thought that she might have had at least one idea if the slavers had set sail for the Imperium, one that would have been disastrous for slaver and mage alike. 

“More will come if we do not make haste,” he replied. “Help me get the rest of them out of there.” 

She nodded and sank to her knees beside the entrance to the hold, whispering to the other mages until they reached for his hands and let themselves be pulled up onto the deck, huddling together in small clumps and staring at him as if he were about to transform into an abomination at any moment. 

“I should return you all to the Circle,” he said. Threatening them with the templars seemed too harsh now that he saw most of them were little more than children. “But since you’re here, I’m assuming you do not want to be in the Circle anymore.” 

There were a few nods and some scattered, half-whispered “No, Messere”s. “Well, what would you have me do with you? Do you have… families to go to?” The word felt strange to say – it was such an alien notion to him – but at least some of them must have left the Circle with a destination in mind. He was answered with a few timid “Yes, Messere”s. 

“We can’t sort it out here. It’s too dangerous. You’ll have to follow me.” Though where he could take them was a question he hadn’t quite worked out himself yet. The mansion was not an option, of course – there may have been plenty of room there, but what would he do with that many human children, even for just a day? He could barely feed himself, and serving wine to children seemed frowned upon, even in a city where they were regularly enslaved or left to starve. He had one idea of where to go, but right then he would rather have faced the slavers again. And maybe a dragon or two as well. 

****************

Anders was in his clinic, hunched over that rickety collection of boards he used as a table, scribbling away so hard at something that he nearly vibrated, quill lashing back and forth. He didn’t look up when Fenris came in, didn’t raise his head at the sound of dozens of feet shuffling across the floor, didn’t appear to notice the tearful sniffles coming from the mages. It was a shock that the man hadn’t already been killed or taken. Fenris cleared his throat, loud enough to startle awake the little girl who had fallen asleep in his arms, and finally Anders jerked his head up, blinking as if he too had just awakened. He shoved the parchment he’d been writing on out of sight under some other papers, as if to hide it from Fenris’s eyes. 

“Fenris, I…” he began, then blinked again, a frantic flutter of his eyelashes, as if to clear his vision. “I hadn’t expected to see you…” he continued slowly, eyes widening as he took in the clusters of frightened Circle apprentices and mages, “…in my clinic, holding a child? And surrounded by mages? What in Andraste’s tits have you done?” 

Fenris laid the girl down on one of the empty cots, wincing as the movement tugged at the wound in his flank, trying to buy time to think of the best way to approach Anders. The mage had had plenty of experience hiding himself, and he seemed to have connections that knew how to make people disappear into the teeming humanity of Kirkwall without notice, whereas Fenris knew only Anders. They hadn’t ended on the best terms, after all, though at the moment, Anders was clearly too shocked to remember the feel of a bottle streaking within a hairsbreadth of his head. Of course, it shouldn’t have taken much convincing to get Anders to help mages, but he didn’t seem to take being disagreed with very well. “I was fighting slavers at the docks and found a hold full of them. They don’t want to go back to the Circle, so I thought you would know what to do with them.” 

Anders sighed, rubbing his brow. “All right. I can hide them for tonight, I suppose, and then we can start finding their families… if they even live in Kirkwall.” He kept worrying at his brow, first and second fingers tapping against his broad forehead, muttering to himself, “Yes, Lirene will be able to help… maybe Mistress Selby.” Fenris shifted from foot to foot, stirring the dirty sawdust with his toes, wondering if he should leave and let Anders take care of it. After all, he’d done more than enough already, hadn’t he? 

He was just about to head for the clinic door, for Hightown, the mansion, and the potions he’d begun hoarding, when Anders raised his head, hand dropping away from his face, and said, “Thank you for rescuing them, Fenris. On their behalf, of course.” His smile was crooked but too warm to be a smirk; it brightened his eyes and wiped some of the tiredness from his face. “I know you didn’t do it for me.” 

Fenris bowed his head, mostly out of polite habit that had been beaten into him for years, but he also hoped that the gesture would hide the darkening of his cheeks. He hated that Anders’s approval pleased him – why should it? He’d attributed it to habit as well – he’d grown up taking orders from mages, doing his best to satisfy them to save his own skin – it would take more years of freedom than he’d had to unlearn it. What most confused him was that although Anders was a mage, Fenris wasn’t frightened of him, and Anders certainly had nothing to offer him, not food, not safety, not coin, nothing. 

“I never thought I’d see you carrying a child around,” Anders said, that little smile still curling up the corner of his lips. 

“Yes, that was an error on my part,” Fenris said dryly. “As you know, I carry a two-handed weapon, so I was essentially helpless.” 

Anders’s brows furrowed for a moment, but then he laughed, a laugh that sounded equal parts amusement, confusion, and incredulity. “I very much doubt that.” He glanced around the room, his gaze jumping among the mages sitting together on cots, arms around one another, some still crying, and sighed. “I should bolt the doors in case the templars got wind of this somehow.” He started rubbing his forehead again, and Fenris could almost see the list of tasks being tallied up in his head. “Have you… have you freed many mages from slavers?” 

“No.” 

Anders’s hand paused on his forehead, and he glared up at Fenris. 

“I mean, this is the first time there have been mages among the slaves,” Fenris blurted, feeling a strange relief sluice over him like cool water when Anders’s expression softened. “That I know of.” 

“I hope it’s been profitable for you. It’s dangerous enough, so you’d need coin to keep you in potions.” 

The memory of the last time they’d seen one another seemed to drift through the stale air between them. He noticed a faint smudge of red along the crests of Anders’s cheekbones, as if someone had dragged a bloody thumb along them, and assumed that he was thinking of it too, though Fenris couldn’t tell if the memory conjured up embarrassment or anger for the mage. Maybe Anders would have turned him away for healing, he couldn’t be sure, but until now, if given the choice between choking on his own blood and asking for Anders’s help, he would have chosen death. A trickle of blood coursed down his side beneath his armor, and he wondered if he’d be making that choice sooner rather than later. 

“I haven’t made a copper from it,” Fenris admitted. “Mercenary jobs were more likely to be helping slavers than hindering them.” 

“Doing the right thing is the least lucrative way of living in this city, I’m afraid,” Anders said. He wove his way among the cots toward the wide front doors, and Fenris limped after him, meaning to slip out and back up to Hightown. It must have nearly been dawn. He could sense a sort of questioning hesitation in Anders as he slid the bolts into place, as if he were expecting Fenris to make his farewells, but instead of leaving he found himself watching Anders’s long fingers working the rough locks, staring at the freckles just below the knuckle of the mage’s first finger and trying to ignore the building throb of pain in his side. 

“I, uh…” He trailed off, coughing into his fist to mask it. Anders raised an eyebrow, tilting his head as if encouraging him to speak. “I would like to apologize for my behavior the last time we met.” 

“Smashing two bottles of Agreggio?” Anders said. He’d turned away from Fenris, watching his own hands fiddling with the lock. Fenris looked at his profile, the torchlight softening the long, sharp line of his nose, gilding the curve of his smiling mouth. “I’d say you should apologize.” He glanced quickly up at Fenris, his eyes earnest, as if checking to make sure Fenris knew he was joking. “I’m sure I said things I perhaps shouldn’t have. At least not at that time. Justice has made me a bit single-minded, which doesn’t always lend itself to sensitivity.” He dropped his eyes back to his hand jiggling the door’s bolt back and forth, and when he spoke, his voice had softened, lowered. “If you had known me before… but I don’t think you would have liked me very much then either.” 

Fenris frowned, glad that Anders wasn’t looking at him. He’d been exposed to the labyrinthine rules of Tevinter etiquette for as long as he could remember, but none of it seemed to be applicable outside of the magisters of Minrathous. Why should Anders care if Fenris liked him before or after he’d become an abomination? “You were a mage then too, were you not?” 

Anders laughed, sharp and bitter. “Yes, I was. That is one thing I will always be.” He sighed, and Fenris regretted having brought the mages to him – he imagined Anders floundering in deep water and Fenris slipping stones in the pockets of his coat, weighing him down, making him struggle that much harder to stay at the surface. “I imagine you have somewhere to be,” he said, hooking his thumb around the bolt as if to slide it open and let Fenris out. “Unless you’re eventually going to ask me to heal the wound you’ve been trying to hide.” 

“I—yes, that would be most welcome,” he replied, knowing how stiff and formal he must sound, a knee-jerk reaction to being thrown off-kilter, returning to his old, familiar habits, though they were not habits that he’d acquired naturally. 

“I can take care of it in the storeroom, if you’d prefer some privacy,” Anders offered, glancing around at the apprentices. They’d seen much worse that night than a wounded elf being healed, and he doubted that they’d be frightened by magic, considering what they were, but at that moment, even being stuck in a small room with Anders was preferable to any more of the apprentices’ wide-eyed scrutiny. He nodded and followed Anders toward the storeroom. 

The mage lit the lanterns as they entered, a brief flicker of magic that brushed against Fenris’s markings like tickling fingers, closed the door behind them – though that did little good, considering the gaps between the woodworm-riddled planks – and gestured for Fenris to sit down on the camp bed. 

“Take off your armor and your tunic, please,” he said, suddenly much more businesslike than Fenris was accustomed to. He’d seen Anders with a few patients before – he’d _been_ his patient before – but those patients had usually been children or unconscious. Fenris obeyed quicker than he would have liked. He knew it had to be done, of course, and there was no reason not to disrobe, other than his usual hesitance about the markings, especially in front of mages, the feeling of vulnerability that came with it, so many ways to be injured bared, though that was foolish too – the markings could be seen through his clothes; he’d known for years that there was no hiding what he was. Still, he watched Anders narrowly from behind the screen of his hair as he unbuckled his breastplate and rolled up the thin linen tunic beneath enough to bare the wound in his side. 

Anders knelt on the packed dirt floor beside the cot, breath hissing through his teeth as if it were _his_ flesh that had been pierced. He wiped away some of the blood with the hem of Fenris’s tunic and began prodding the skin around the wound with fingertips so gentle that they felt like butterflies lighting on Fenris’s waist, arching his long fingers to avoid brushing the markings. The wound had somehow missed all of the curving tendrils of lyrium, a single red-weeping eye staring out from among the entwined vine-like markings. 

“The flesh around the puncture is already hot,” he murmured. Fenris thought he was talking to himself until Anders looked up at him, eyebrows drawn together. “I can feel something inside the wound. Is there any chance the blade broke off inside?” 

Fenris shrugged – he was so accustomed to ignoring pain that he hadn’t even noticed anything different about this injury. 

“How did you make it so far?” Anders asked, shaking his head as if in astonishment. “Any wrong move, and the blade could’ve pierced something vital.” He sat back on his heels. “Well, _more_ vital.” 

“Can you heal it?” 

“Of course,” Anders snapped. He looked so insulted by the question that Fenris expected the feathers on his pauldrons to bristle like a posturing pigeon’s. “I’ll have to extract the blade by hand, though, which might be difficult, because I can’t see how far in it is.” He pinched the bridge of his nose between this thumb and forefinger, and then dropped his hand into his lap and gave Fenris an apologetic look. “I don’t suppose you could do your… magical fisting thing and pull it out yourself?” 

Fenris raised an eyebrow at the phrase “magical fisting” and shook his head. “I have never attempted it. It would most likely be… extremely unpleasant.” 

“So only good for use on mages, templars, and other unsavory characters then?” Anders replied, but there was no real heat in it. He was chewing the corner of his lips thoughtfully, brow furrowed. After a moment, he reached for Fenris, those delicately hovering hands already poised, but then hesitated. “I’m going to have to use magic now, is that all right?” 

At a nod from Fenris, two glowing spheres appeared in Anders’s hands and, following the restless flicks of his fingers, swirled above Fenris’s skin, their light picking out the lyrium in his markings and making it glitter. “You must be the luckiest elf in Kirkwall,” Anders said. “Not that you have much competition there. But the blade seems to have missed any organs or major veins, so all I have to do is get it out and then heal the wound itself.” 

Fenris sniffed. “You make it sound so easy.” 

“I was trying to be reassuring,” Anders replied, a hint of a smile tugging at his mouth. “This part will hurt quite a bit. Do you want something to bite down on? If I can find something clean…” He glanced around the storeroom, but then his eyes lit on the look of distaste Fenris was giving him. “Probably not.” 

“No,” Fenris said. “I am accustomed to pain.” He let his markings flare in a blue lightning flash. “The pain when I received these was so intense that it burned away all memory of my former life, and they have pained me every day since. So no, I don’t need anything to bite down on.” 

Anders was staring him with wide eyes, face sober for a change. But then one eyebrow arched upward, and that little mocking grin pinched up the corner of his mouth. Fenris supposed it must have just been a habit, because Anders couldn’t have been foolish enough to think it would be effective with him. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re very intense? You must be loads of fun at parties.” 

“I have never attended a party as a guest,” he replied, realizing too late that Anders had been teasing him. If they had been friends, perhaps it even would have been considered a joke. 

“They’re much less fun after you’ve become a host to a spirit of Justice, let me tell you,” Anders said, and his smile seemed so sincere that Fenris almost returned it. “Now, let me just get my instruments, and we can get started.” He rummaged around under the cot where Fenris sat and pulled out a wooden box, opening it to reveal a collection of metal instruments, dull but clean. The sight made Fenris’s skin prickle – he had a brief vision of similar tools covered in blood, _his_ blood, strewn across a table in a magister’s laboratory. He tried not to shrink away from the open case in the mage’s hands. 

“I try to avoid using magic unless it’s completely necessary,” Anders was saying as he selected a pair of forceps from the case, slipping his fingers through the handles. “If I had another mage here to help me, maybe I could spare more magic, but as it is…” He trailed off with a sigh, and Fenris wondered if he was thinking about the Tranquil mage from the Chantry. 

Then his fingertips were cool and light around the inflamed flesh of Fenris’s wound, and he gently worked the tip of the forceps into it, seeking the broken-off dagger blade. Fenris flinched at the touch, clamping his lips together to stop up the gasp that tried to push past them, and Anders looked up at him from under a brow furrowed with concentration. 

“Talking might distract you from the pain a little,” he suggested. 

“I need no such distraction,” Fenris replied, forcing the words out in a rush before Anders started easing the blade out. 

“Well, it might distract _me_ ,” Anders murmured. A smaller ball of magic hovered over his other hand, and he seemed to be alternating between probing with the forceps and the spell. “It usually does. Probably why I do it so often.” 

“Yes.” 

The pressure on his wound stopped, and he looked down to find the fool mage actually _pouting_ at him, as if Fenris had insulted his cat or said that the feathers on his coat looked ridiculous. He rolled his eyes. The _magical fisting_ idea was becoming more palatable by the minute. “Very well,” he said, making no effort to keep the annoyance from his voice, though it seemed to roll off Anders like rain off oiled cloth. “What would you have me speak of?” 

“I’ve always wanted to know more about Tevinter,” Anders replied, making a show to Fenris’s eyes of being intent on whatever he was doing with those blighted forceps, his voice offhand as if it were just the first suggestion that had come to him. “Back at the Circle, the First Enchanter and the senior mages tried to scare us with tales of the Black Divine stalking Thedas, but the apprentices talked about it all the time, dreaming of what it must be like to live in a place where mages were free, where they could even rule.” The tugging and twisting in Fenris’s side paused for a moment, and he glanced down to find Anders sitting back on his heels again and looking up expectantly at Fenris like a child begging its parent for a story. “We found books written in old Tevene in the library and looked at the engravings until they almost fell to pieces, even though we couldn’t read them.” 

Fenris didn’t bother to mask his sneer. He wanted to extinguish that spark of excitement from Anders’s eyes like wet fingertips pinching out a candle flame. “Do you want me to tell you about the Argent Spire in Minrathous?” he asked. “It was difficult to look at it when my head was weighted down by a collar.” 

Anders blinked as if Fenris had spit in his face, and for a moment two pinpoints of blue flames swirled in his eyes before he bent back to his work, his fingers far less gentle than they’d been before. 

“Minrathous is an illusion, mage,” Fenris said, wincing at a sharp jerk at the blade in his side. “It is held together with magic because the magisters would rather indulge their whims and desires than actually go to the trouble of fixing it. It is like gangrene festering behind scabbed-over skin.” The magic in Anders’s hand had blinked out – he was digging determinedly with the forceps, not bothering to wipe away the blood that rolled from the wound. Fenris wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of flinching at the pain. “Life in the Imperium is like a ladder with only three rungs. The mages are at the top, then the _soporati_ , and at the bottom are the slaves. There is no way to climb that ladder, but it is exceedingly easy to fall from it.” 

Anders’s hands paused, faltered, and the blood-slick forceps dropped into his lap. “So there really is no place for mages to live in freedom,” he said softly, his shoulders slumped, and Fenris felt a quick twinge of guilt, like a nerve being pinched. 

“You would have been happier there,” he offered, but Anders’s response was a glare, eyes narrowed, anger that was untouched by Justice. “There, your magic would be a mark of honor,” Fenris explained. “Apprenticed to the right magister, you would do well.” 

“I’m assuming there is a down side,” Anders muttered, bowing back to his work, his hands no gentler than before. 

“Only if you’re bothered by owning a few slaves and performing the occasional blood ritual,” Fenris replied through gritted teeth. 

“So they _all_ do those things, do they?” Anders asked. 

“Just the ones who don't complain about how powerless and persecuted they are.” 

“Believe it or not, Fenris, some mages just want to live in peace like everyone else. Dull but comfortable peace,” Anders said. “To die in their own bed at a ripe old age after a long life of not being watched by templars every moment. To never have the threat of being made Tranquil hanging over them.” 

“Why was your friend made Tranquil? Do you know?” he asked, distantly impressed when Anders didn’t jab the blade even deeper into his flesh. 

“No,” Anders said. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Nobody deserves that.” He took a deep breath – Fenris heard it quiver in his chest as if he were holding back a sob. “Karl was a good man, a good mage. But even if he hadn’t been, being made Tranquil should never be an option. Mages should be punished for crimes when they commit them but… not with that. The Circles may be prisons, but at least you have your own mind, your own dreams to hide in. For the Tranquil, their own bodies are their prisons.” 

“I know some mages who deserve that,” Fenris said. He all but had a ledger of them in his head, but Danarius’s name was always at the top of it. 

Anders waved his hand toward the door to the main room of the clinic, lamplight catching on the blood on his fingers. “What about them? Do they deserve to be made Tranquil?” he asked. 

Fenris, between the shooting pains in his side and arguing with Anders – Maker, but the mage was stubborn! – had almost forgotten about the apprentices and young mages in the other room, but now their muffled voices and quieting sobs filtered back to him through the gaps in the wall and door. He almost grudgingly shook his head, but Anders wasn’t finished, his hand trembling on the forceps, eyes hot and golden as brass andirons. “Because it might happen if we – if _I_ – don’t handle this properly. And for what? For wanting to see their families?” 

“I had not…” Fenris paused, trying to think of a way of rephrasing it to conceal his ignorance. He wasn’t sure why he bothered, since Anders showed his own ignorance off very freely. “In the Imperium, a mage would never be made Tranquil for something so minor,” he said, omitting the fact that the Rite of Tranquility was almost never performed for an actual crime in the Imperium, unless being considered a threat by someone more powerful was a crime. 

“This isn’t the Imperium!” Anders spat. “It’s almost as if mages are treated completely differently here, isn’t it?” He glared up at Fenris, but after a moment, his expression changed, as if he’d seen something in Fenris’s face that had frightened him. Then, without another word, his grip tightened on the forceps, and with one tug, he pulled the blade out of Fenris and dropped it onto the dirt floor. 

A groan of pain tore from Fenris’s throat before he could stifle it, and he doubled over, his face falling into the feathers on Anders’s coat. Hot, sticky blood gushed down his side, but then Anders’s hand was there, pressing hard against the wound to staunch the blood, and his other hand lit on Fenris’s hip, holding him still as the cool waves of healing magic washed over him. Fenris felt himself shaking, as if he were sobbing without crying, his teeth on the point of chattering. He couldn’t make himself sit upright, though the spines of Anders’s feathers were pricking his cheeks, and he was fairly certain that neither of them wanted to be in this proximity, close enough to be conscious of panting breath and hammering heartbeats. Before his wide, staring eyes, he could see the feathers minutely trembling, and he knew it was from the pounding of their wearer’s heart. 

And yet, Anders was stroking Fenris’s side as if he were one of those cats the mage spoke of in his sleep, still being careful to avoid the arcs of lyrium, and as little as Fenris wanted to admit it, it was… soothing. 

“You should lie down for a while,” Anders suggested. “The wound was deep, and even with healing, blood loss can take a toll.” 

“I have endured worse,” Fenris said, forcing himself to sit up, expecting twinges of pain even as he knew there would be none. He tugged down his tunic over smooth, unscarred skin and would have strapped his breastplate back on if he hadn’t had to reach past Anders for it. “And without healing. I, uh, thank you for your help.” 

One of Anders’s eyebrows ticked upward, a movement so minute Fenris wondered if he’d imagined it, along with the faintest twist at the corner of Anders’s mouth, and then the mage turned away, tossing the bloodied forceps into a nearby bucket, where they landed with a splash. They sat in silence, in deepening gloom as the lamp burned low, listening to their own slowing breath. 

“What became of the elf girl?” Fenris asked finally. The subject had been troubling him – he’d been sure she’d died – but he also felt as if he were bailing water out of a boat to keep it afloat, though he couldn’t say what the boat was. Conversation with Anders? That had already proven fairly disastrous – it only took a few words before they were bickering. His own waning wakefulness? The stairs back up to Hightown were long and steep, and after a night of killing slavers and being prodded by blades, magic, and a mage’s fingers, his muscles weren’t equal to the climb just yet, he told himself. 

The expression of surprise that crossed Anders’s face when he looked up made Fenris feel as if he were looking into one of fabled eluvians that the magisters had tried so hard to reproduce, seeing back through time to when Anders had been a child, before he’d been taken by the templars – his eyes widened, eyebrows arching upward. 

“She lived,” the mage replied slowly. “I don’t think I could have managed it on my own.” He left the rest unspoken – _without your lyrium markings_ – and Fenris wasn’t sure if he’d avoided mentioning it out of shame for having tapped them without Fenris’s consent or out of respect for Fenris’s feelings on the matter. 

“I went to the caves where the killer was, but they had been sealed shut,” he said, omitting the fact that they’d looked so much like the slaver caves Hadriana had once taken him to that he hadn’t been able to make himself go in. “The stone was melted.” 

“I wonder how that could have happened?” Anders replied with a grin. 

“But… why? Wasn’t it dangerous?” Fenris asked. 

Anders shrugged, the gesture exaggerated by the ridiculous pauldrons of his coat. “Lia’s father said that there was no justice in Kirkwall for elves, and that piqued Justice’s interest, to put it mildly.” He swung his eyes toward Fenris, the corner of his mouth twitching upward again. “I _can_ care about more than one thing at a time, you know. And what about you? It would have been dangerous for you as well.” He got to his feet and went over to the door, opening it a crack to check on the apprentices. Fenris, trying to conceal the trembling of his legs, pushed himself up from the cot and followed him. 

“I doubt very much that a creature that preyed on children would have been much of a challenge for me,” he replied. He was sure it would sound like arrogance, but he’d never seen the point in false humility when it came to his abilities. Danarius hadn’t allowed it either – he wanted everyone to know exactly what his favorite pet could do. 

The expected sarcastic comment from Anders about that arrogance never came, much to Fenris’s surprise, and when he looked over at the mage, he saw why. Anders’s eyes were lighting here and there on the apprentice mages, slowly, like flies made lazy by the summer heat, and he appeared more overwhelmed by the moment until finally he slumped back against a stack of crates behind him as if standing were suddenly too much trouble. 

“I could stay here and help,” Fenris offered hesitantly. He wasn’t sure what he could do – the apprentices still seemed mostly terrified of him, and he had no talents for healing or much of anything other than killing. 

“Thank you. Tomorrow I’ll be able to confer with… people who can help, but for now, we should just try to find everyone a place to sleep. I hope they don’t mind flies… and rats... and chokedamp.” Anders let out a tired sigh, but to Fenris’s eyes, he looked slightly brighter, more focused, perhaps. “Even I have to admit that the Circle in Ferelden had better accommodations than this.” 

Fenris trailed Anders through the clinic, trying to keep out of the way while the mage assigned cots and gently questioned the apprentices but staying close enough to overhear their conversations. Anders had an easy way with them that both did and did not surprise him – of course the man would be comfortable with his own kind, and judging by the amount of Fereldan urchins hanging around the clinic, he obviously knew how to deal with children. Fenris felt a stab of envy at that ease, though he couldn’t decipher whether he was envious of being on the giving end or the receiving end of it. In Minrathous, he had sometimes gone days without speaking to anyone beyond a “yes, Master”, and in Kirkwall, he talked even less when he wasn’t thrown into Anders’s company, and he had never felt much of a lack because of it. On the other hand, the idea of being envious of being spoken to by Anders in a kind voice, with no accompanying glares or grimaces, was too far-fetched to contemplate. 

Most of the apprentices had simple stories delivered with complete candor, as one would expect of children – they’d run away from the Circle to visit their families – but the older mages were more reticent, their reasons for fleeing less straightforward. The first girl who had climbed out of the hold of the slaver ship refused to speak at all beyond telling Anders that she had been born in Kirkwall, and another claimed she wasn’t trying to escape from the Circle at all, which seemed to contradict everything Anders had said about the Circles – she had been trying to reach the Circle in Ostwick after the Kirkwall Circle had refused her request to be transferred. 

“But why would you want to _stay_ in the Circle if you had a chance to get away?” Anders asked incredulously, and Fenris heard that all-too-familiar argumentative tone leach into the mage’s voice. 

The apprentice stared down at her lap, where her fingers twisted the too-long cuffs of her robe’s sleeves. They were fraying and stained, as if she worried at them often. “My… friend was sent to the Ostwick Circle. The First Enchanter said they needed more talent in Ostwick, but I think it was because the templars knew about…” She trailed off and gave the raveled edge of her sleeve a vicious twist. Then she swallowed hard and raised her head to look directly at Anders, seeming unwilling to acknowledge the tears making dirty tracks down her cheeks. “I just wanted to be with her, whether we were in a Circle or not.” 

Fenris swung his eyes from the apprentice to Anders in time to see Anders’s face harden, chill, as if he had been hit with one of his own elemental spells, the warm brown of his eyes incongruous in that suddenly cold face. _He is thinking of himself and Karl_ , Fenris thought. _He gave up his own freedom for Karl_. And now Karl was dead, and all Anders had was a self-righteous, bellowing spirit that drove him along. 

“I see,” was all that Anders said in a bland, empty voice. “Perhaps we can find you a ship to Ostwick then,” he suggested, but the apprentice seemed to hear the hollowness of the words and did not appear comforted as she curled up on the camp bed Anders directed her to. 

They kept watch after the apprentices had quieted down, some even managing to sleep on the hard wooden cots that were streaked with old bloodstains. Fenris thought of the Gallows with its huge golden statues of mages contorted in agony and wondered if the apprentices, most of them barely out of childhood, hadn’t already seen worse in their lives than a bit of dried blood. He and Anders sat side by side on the last empty table, facing the doors, mostly in silence. A few times, Fenris noticed Anders nodding off, chin beginning to slip off his fist before he’d jerk awake again. 

“I can keep watch alone, if you wish,” Fenris offered, but Anders shook his head, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands as if he could grind the tiredness out of them. 

“No, no, you’ve already done too much. This is my duty now,” he insisted, but after a few minutes, he wilted again like a wax statue in the sun and Fenris let him sleep. It was an odd sensation – perhaps not an entirely unwelcome one – to have someone’s weight pressed against your side, their body heat seeping through your clothes and into your flesh. Anders seemed accustomed enough to it, judging by the way he kept sighing in his sleep, the first contented sound Fenris had ever heard him make, and leaning harder against Fenris. 

That was how Lirene, a woman Fenris vaguely remembered from the time he’d been recuperating at the clinic, found them hours later, slipping in through a small door at the back of the clinic that was mostly hidden by crates. Fenris, ignoring her narrow-eyed looks, elbowed Anders awake and hopped off the table, leaving the mage to explain the situation. She shot plenty of glares his way as Anders spoke to her, but eventually her face took on the same expression of purpose that Anders’s had the night before. 

“Yes, Mistress Selby will be able to help us,” Fenris heard her say. “Now you must go and get some food in your belly before you fall over. I will take care of the apprentices.” Anders began murmuring protests, but she spoke over him, addressing Fenris. “You, elf. Take him to the Hanged Man and see that he eats.” 

She seemed taken aback when he gave her a slight formal bow. “As you wish, Messere,” he said, enjoying the warring expressions of surprise and suspicion on her face. 

“Thank you, Ser Elf,” she murmured, pressing a few coppers into his hand. “Make sure he does not give this to any paupers along the way, either.” 

Fenris bowed his head again, mostly to hide his smirk, which only deepened when Anders sputtered, “I _am_ standing right here, you know! And besides, what if the templars arrive while I’m gone?” 

“I will have some of the boys watch the way to the clinic, and if there is any templar movement, they will come to fetch you at the Hanged Man,” Lirene replied. Anders frowned as if disappointed that he couldn’t think of any more excuses not to go, but he let her shoo him and Fenris out of the clinic. 

The light reflecting off the water was dense and milky, the lichen coating the walls of the Undercity still faintly glowing. The sun was not yet strong enough to burn away the chokedamp, which gathered like carded wool in the corners and depressions. Fenris gagged, trying to hide a cough in his fist, but Anders untied the wear-grayed kerchief from around his own neck and handed it to Fenris. “Tie it over your mouth and nose until we’re out of Darktown. I’m mostly used to it by now.” 

Fenris raised an eyebrow but draped the cloth over his nose and mouth and tied it behind his head. It smelled like Anders, the salty tang of human sweat and a warm, grassy scent that reminded him of newly churned butter. Inhaling the odor that closely made the hair prick up on the back of his neck, but it was better than breathing in the chokedamp. Still, as soon they emerged into the filthy yet not poisonous air of Lowtown, he tore the cloth off and tossed it back to Anders. 

“I should never have left the clinic,” Anders muttered as they wove through the warren-like alleys of Lowtown. “I don’t know how much time we’ll have before the apprentices are missed and the templars use their phylacteries.” He scrubbed his hand over his forehead and into his hair, sending strands of it springing free. “How many templars will come down on our heads then? Not that you shouldn’t have brought them to me,” he said, giving Fenris a sheepish, sidelong look, as if expecting him to protest, which he probably would have done, if only to point out that one who claimed to want mages free couldn’t complain about mages being, well, _freed_. 

“Phylacteries? Are those not a form of blood magic?” Fenris asked. 

“Yes, they’re nothing if not hypocrites, the bastards. And liars, of course. My phylactery should have been destroyed when I became a Grey Warden, but it wasn’t. Though maybe you’d see that as just being cautious.” 

Fenris frowned. “Considering that you are no longer with the Grey Wardens, it would appear their caution was justified, would it not?” 

“There’s no way they could have known that I would…” Anders trailed off, some of the indignation leaching out of his voice. “I hope the boys Lirene hired are keeping good watch.” 

The Hanged Man looked like every other building in Lowtown, with its stained walls and rusted iron door, except for the empty wine bottles scattered on the pavement outside and the giant, flayed-looking man dangling by his ankles above the entrance. 

“I don’t understand the name,” Fenris said, looking up at the man as he swung, creaking, in the early morning breeze. “Was someone hanged here? Why would that make people want to drink here, much less hire a room?” 

“It means being drunk,” Anders replied, a tiny, infuriating smile tucking up the corners of his lips. 

Fenris clenched his fists and kept looking up at the hanged man, trying to hide the sneer on his face. He spoke Qunari, Tevene, _and_ the common tongue, and yet this mage was mocking him for not knowing some ridiculous Southern turn of phrase that didn’t even make sense? 

“Not that they sell much worth drinking here,” Anders went on, “but they do offer the best bowl of… something in Kirkwall.” His nose wrinkled. “Maybe that’s why there are no cats around anymore.” 

“Perhaps I will stick to drinking then,” Fenris said. He’d been avoiding inns and taverns for what seemed like years now, since barkeeps and innkeepers had a bad habit of selling him out the moment a Tevinter guard flashed some coin, but Lirene did not seem the type of woman to suffer being disobeyed. “Come on, the templars will no doubt be missing their charges. The sooner we return to your clinic, the better.”


	7. Chapter 7

“Sour ale, vomit, and the smell of desperation,” Fenris said in a dull voice. His reaction to the interior of the Hanged Man had almost been worth the exhaustion, hunger, and constant gnawing fear of returning to the clinic to find it soaked in the blood of apprentice mages – it had been a flurry of sneering, brow-furrowing, and nose-wrinkling, every fleeting expression riddled with sheer disgust.

“And this is one of the better taverns around here,” Anders replied, forcing a cheerfulness into his voice that he didn’t really feel and that earned him an arch of the eyebrow from Fenris. 

“They let you in. It can’t be that much better.” 

“You’ve been in Kirkwall for months now,” he said, ignoring the insult. Fenris’s voice, he’d noticed, almost always flat when he wasn’t shouting like an enraged beast, went even flatter when he made a joke, and it was as flat as the tavern’s warped bar now. “How have you never been here?” 

“I’ve been living in an abandoned mansion with a full wine cellar,” Fenris replied, following Anders to an empty table and sitting down across from him. 

“Fair enough,” Anders said. “Do you want anything? The food is cheap, so I’m sure there will be some left for a pint.” 

“Rum.” Fenris’s eyes darted around the room again, and he murmured, “Which unfortunately doesn’t come in pints.” 

They sat in silence until the bowl of grease-sheened broth with some gristle floating in it and Fenris’s rum arrived. As he poked at the stringy meat, Anders considered why this awkwardness should have suddenly descended between them – they’d been talking easily enough, and Fenris seemed to finally have developed a sense of humor. Their knees brushed under the table from time to time, but he’d all but drooled on Fenris’s shoulder earlier that morning, so it couldn’t have just been proximity making them tense. He took a bite of the stew and tried to swallow it before it could settle on his tongue at all – Fenris seemed to be taking the same approach with his rum as well, gulping it rather than sipping, jerking his head back with each swallow as if to force it down quicker. Anders realized it was the first time they’d been face to face for any length of time since the night in the alley behind the Chantry – most of the time, Anders found himself approaching Fenris obliquely, like a spooked horse he was trying to soothe. He felt himself flush, as if he were the one drinking the rum, and choked on his mouthful of stew, though he wasn’t sure _why_ he should be embarrassed. He’d been in shock that night, grieving, not thinking coherently. If he had been, he never would have done what he did. And yet that didn’t make looking at Fenris any easier, so instead he stared down at his own distorted reflection on the oily surface of his stew. 

“Well, hello again, moody mage!” The voice sounded the way Anders imagined Fenris’s Agreggio must have tasted, and he looked up into eyes that were as bright and golden as brass. “I see you’ve found another friend to replace the one you were moaning over the last time you were here,” the woman continued, turning her crooked smile on Fenris as she sat down beside Anders, her voice lowering into a purr like that of a cat having its chin scratched. “Though if that friend was as handsome as this one, I can see why you were moaning over him.” 

_Karl_ , Anders thought. _She must be talking about Karl_. He cast his mind back desperately to that night after he’d left the Chantry, bleeding, bereft, and had hoped that Justice would take pity on him enough to let him get drunk. 

“He’s not my friend,” Fenris said, and Anders silently thanked him for taking the woman’s attention away from him for a moment. 

She leaned across the table, still smiling at Fenris, and Anders could tell that the elf was struggling to keep his eyes from dipping down into the acre of cleavage she was showing. “Oh, so you’re _that_ kind of friends? In that case, I’m happy to watch.” 

Fenris went crimson to the pointed tips of his ears, and his mouth worked for a few seconds but no sound came out. 

“Acquaintances,” Anders blurted. “We’re acquaintances.” 

“Associates,” Fenris offered. 

The woman laughed. The sound of it made him feel like she was running her fingertips down his spine. “Pity. That would have been an eyeful. But I’m afraid I’m losing my touch. This is the second time you’ve forgotten me, and the general consensus has always been that I’m unforgettable.” 

“Being punched in the face must have affected my memory,” Anders said, glancing at Fenris, whose cheeks darkened until they were nearly purple. He was staring down into his cup, swiveling it on its edge on the tabletop, looking as if he wished the Void would open up in the middle of the Hanged Man and suck him into its endless emptiness. Anders hoped at least some of that mortification was out of regret for having backhanded him, but he wouldn’t have wagered on it. 

“And imagine, I’ve remembered you twice! _Twice_! That almost never happens.” She gestured toward the barkeep, calling for three drinks. “I’m Isabela. _Captain_ Isabela. It must have been your little trick with the electricity that made you so memorable. Though I must say, I mostly remember your fingertips.” Isabela chuckled, the throaty huskiness of it almost certainly the result of years of practice, though he had to admit they’d been years well-spent – the sound of that laugh was as intimate as a hand on one’s thigh. 

Anders closed his eyes, rifling through the pages of his memory of his time as a runaway from the Fereldan Circle. He must have met her then – before he’d been too young, and there weren’t many beautiful Rivaini women walking around with half their chests exposed in the Deep Roads – but he’d been free with many of his less-Chantry-approved magical abilities, among other things, back then. Behind his eyelids, he saw crackling threads of indigo magic climbing up dark skin and… griffons? “The Pearl! Wasn’t it? You really liked that girl with the griffon tattoos!” 

“The Lay Warden!” Isabela shook her head, laughing, and then turned her golden gaze on Fenris. “You know, next time you get a tattoo, you might consider griffons. Maybe on your….” 

She trailed off as the barmaid appeared with the round of rum, and Fenris tossed his back immediately, gripping the table edge with one steel gauntlet as if the room were already spinning. 

“I do like a man with tattoos, you know,” Isabela continued after the barmaid had gone. “Yours might not be griffons, but they are very nice.” She reached across the table and traced one of the markings on Fenris’s palm with a fingertip. Anders thought he saw Fenris wince slightly at the touch. “Do they cover your _entire_ body,” she asked, looking up at Fenris through the dark shade of her eyelashes. 

“No.” 

“Pity. Of course, I’m more used to sailors, and they usually have pictures of breasts.” She smirked, still running her finger along Fenris’s. Anders could have turned into an abomination right then and neither of them would’ve noticed, he thought. “I never understood it myself, but since I have the real thing, I don’t need ink.” 

“I suppose a pair of lyrium breasts tattooed on my chest would make things better,” Fenris replied, and Isabela let out a caroling peal of laughter. 

“Oh, I like you,” she cooed at Fenris. “You’re drier than Grand Cleric Elthina’s crotch, aren’t you?” Fenris looked puzzled, but Isabela barreled on. “All that lyrium makes me wish I were a mage. Now _that_ would be a good time.” 

Anders snorted, and Fenris snatched his hand away from Isabela’s caressing fingers, glaring across the table at Anders from under his lowered brows as if he had been the one who had made the comment. But the expression didn’t have the sharp contempt it usually did – it looked as if the elf were glaring at him through a smeared window, his face somehow hazy, smudged. 

“Must you mages infest everything with your magic, even….” 

“Fucking?” Isabela offered, sending another flush sweeping over Fenris’s cheeks. “Why not use the gifts the Maker gave you?” she asked with a shrug. “Maybe you’re just jealous?” 

“Hardly. Magic ruins everything it touches eventually,” Fenris began, and Anders rolled his eyes with a poorly stifled groan. How many times would he have to listen to this tirade? The bowl of the Hanged Man’s specialty seemed palatable by comparison. 

“You wouldn’t be saying that if your _associate_ here had worked his electricity magic on you,” Isabela cut in. Anders choked on the mouthful of stew he’d been trying to swallow and, coughing, glanced at Fenris with watering eyes. Fenris’s eyes met his and immediately swerved away, his cheeks so red-mottled it looked as though, like the fellow at the next table over, he’d fallen asleep face-first in a puddle of red wine. 

Isabela reached over and slapped Anders on the back a few times. “Did Corff over-pepper his concoction again?” she murmured, her face schooled to an innocent, wide-eyed expression that was completely incongruous on it. 

“Isabela! My dusky goddess! There you are!” A young man, from Hightown by the look of his clothing, was coming toward their table, one hand pressed to his heart, the other gesturing grandiosely. 

“Maker’s balls!” Isabela muttered and scrambled off the bench. “If you’ll excuse me, I, uh, have to have a bath. A nice, long bath.” She aimed another coy, crooked smile at Fenris. “If you’d like to join me, I can make sure they use the extra-large tub.” She hurried away toward the stairs that led to the tavern’s rented rooms, managing to undulate even then. Must have been all that time at sea, Anders supposed. The young nobleman followed her, still singing her praises in a series of stilted metaphors. 

Anders raised an eyebrow and turned toward Fenris, propping his chin on his hand as if fascinated by Fenris’s possible answer. Which, somewhat predictably, was a strangled cough and another round of blushing. Predictable, and yet oddly gratifying. He wasn’t jealous of Isabela’s attention – she was like a groaning banquet table in the form of a woman, and yet she seemed to offer food he couldn’t muster up any interest in. “You can go, if you like. I can find my way back to the clinic.” 

“No, I… well, let’s just say I would be more confident of emerging with my whole skin intact from a meeting with Danarius than a _bath_ with Captain Isabela,” Fenris replied. Anders thought he detected a hint of regret on the elf’s face. 

“Maybe we should inform the templars,” Anders said, and Fenris gave a strange, juddery laugh that told Anders just how drunk he was. “Speaking of which, I should be getting back.” 

“Yes, of course,” Fenris said and tried to stand up, which seemed to involve untangling his legs laboriously from the bench. He walked a straight enough line to the front door, but some of his usual buoyant grace seemed to be missing. Or, Anders thought as Fenris bumped into the doorjamb and ricocheted into him, all of it. 

“I mean it,” said Anders as they turned into a narrow alley, the light dim and warm from the sun slanting across the top of the passageway, “you should be wary of Captain Isabela. Pirates tend to dock in unsavory places.” 

He expected some prickly, snarling response from Fenris, but the elf just gave a murmured, “Hm,” that made Anders glance over at him. He seemed… pensive, mouth screwed up in that thoughtful pout of his, brows furrowed. Anders shrugged to himself – he’d heal Fenris if he came to him with some kind of exotic Rivaini pox, but a friendly warning seemed to already be pushing the bounds of his responsibility – and kept walking. Even a drunk Fenris moved silently when there was nothing in his way to crash into, so the alley filled with the sound of Anders’s boots and little else, the bustle of Lowtown muted, even the cries of the gulls overheard faint. 

Then Fenris’s arm, with its spiked steel vambrace, bare tawny flesh, and pale, sinuous embroidery of lyrium, was blocking his way. He stopped short, going up on his toes to avoid bumping into it, and gave the elf a questioning look. 

Anders could barely see Fenris’s face in the gloom, which had deepened the farther they’d walked into the alley, but he could sense an embarrassed hesitance knotted up with a hectic eagerness. When Anders had stopped and turned to face him, Fenris had snatched his arm away and rubbed the back of his neck, glancing down at the vent spouting chokedamp from the Undercity, at the rat trundling along the alley as if it had somewhere to be, at a pile of pebbles and the accumulated dust of years. 

“Something wrong?” Anders prompted after a long moment. 

“Show me the trick,” Fenris blurted. He seemed to be listing a bit on his feet, but his voice sounded sober enough, just with a hot, rough edge to it like a sword in mid-forge. “The electricity one Isabela spoke of.” The golden flecks of light in his eyes seemed brighter in the dimness of the alley, and they flashed up at Anders as Fenris gave him a look that he would have called pleading on anyone else. 

Anders blinked in surprise and let out a hesitant laugh that sounded frayed to his own ears. “What? It _is_ magic, you know. Aren’t you afraid it will ruin you as soon as it touches you?” 

“Do not be foolish,” Fenris said stiffly. Anders thought he heard a splinter of doubt entering the elf’s voice. “From what that woman described, it sounded like a mere party trick. Or something a child would do to impress his friends.” 

It was a struggle to keep his face smooth – he _had_ worked out the electricity spell as a way of getting other children to like him, for who _wouldn’t_ want a friend who could make goosebumps rise on your skin and shivers run through your body with just a flicker of his fingers? And wasn’t that a reason to use it on Fenris now? Not to befriend him, of course – that seemed unlikely – or even to impress him, but perhaps to give a little pleasurable thrill to a body used to pain? “Don’t magisters use their magic for similar purposes? I would have thought that would disgust you.” 

“But I am asking for this,” Fenris said, his voice hardening with exasperation, as if Anders was being willfully obtuse and difficult – which, granted, he was. Anders would have thought he would have heard doubt fracturing it or embarrassment, but Fenris’s stubbornness seemed to have won out. “Like with healing.” 

“Well, if you’re sure,” Anders said, raising his hand, tiny indigo filaments of lightning sparking at his fingertips. Fenris inhaled sharply, almost a gasp, and took a step back, flattening himself against the stained alley wall. Maybe he was having second thoughts, but a request was a request, and Anders had agreed to it. 

He passed his fingers over Fenris’s bare skin, carefully avoiding the tattoos, his hand hovering above it without ever touching his arms, his throat, his cheeks. Everyone he had used the spell on had called it “the electricity thing”, but he had refined it over the years to be so much more than just a few faint, pleasant zaps of energy. It was the billow of cool breath on sweat-slick skin, the moment before a first kiss, the passage of a lover’s hand over one’s body, cinching the flesh into prickles of anticipation. Fenris was watching him, his gaze hazy not just from drink anymore, the pupils getting wider with each beat of his heart, like ink dripping into a saucer drop by drop. Anders stepped closer, close enough to hear the accelerating stutter of Fenris’s breath, the gulp as he swallowed, close enough to count each strand of silver-white hair that clung to his sweat-damp cheeks. The chokedamp veiled the opening of the alley, and Fenris was pinned against the wall before him like a butterfly to a piece of cork, arms splayed to either side, gauntlet tips digging into stone. 

Still never touching Fenris, he ran the magic up his legs and over his breastplate, the threads of electricity penetrating the skin-tight leather and steel to brush against his inner thighs and nipples. Fenris gasped, arching away from the wall as if the magic were strings tied to Anders’s fingers, drawing him toward Anders. His toes curled in the dust at their feet, minute puffs of it spiraling upward to mingle with the chokedamp. With one finger, Anders brushed Fenris’s lower lip with the magic, soft and quick as a lover’s tongue, and a quiet groan tumbled out of Fenris’s mouth before he clamped it shut. Back still arched as fully drawn bow, Fenris twisted, and his hips pressed briefly against Anders, the expected hardness of his belt followed by a less expected one, hot and insistent. Anders had taken no more than a sip of the vile rum, but at the graze of Fenris’s erection against him, dizziness spun through him, giddy, vertiginous, as if a giant had picked up the alley with them in it and shaken it. 

Smiling to himself, he directed his magic lower, running it up and down from the elf’s abdomen to his groin in rills of electricity. Fenris’s eyes were squeezed shut now, head thrown back against the alley wall, breath ragged panting that verged on moaning. The lyrium tattooed on his throat seemed to sing louder to Anders as he held onto his connection to the Fade. If he just leaned forward a little, he could skim his own lips over those curves of lyrium, over Fenris’s throat…. 

He realized that Justice was… aware. Not rumbling complaints, criticisms, or warnings as he usually did on the now-rare occasions when Anders slept with someone, but listening somehow. If he’d had a physical form, he would have had his head cocked to one side as if listening to a far-off sound. The lyrium, of course, its chiming no longer the clarion tones of the Fade but the alluring voice of a Desire Demon. Anders remembered the first time he had heard it, that hum that made the hairs on his arms stand straight up – _like the air right before lightning strikes_ , he thought, _like_ potential. But what potential was there in a mage-hating elf slave who seemed to know how to fight and be generally infuriating and little else? 

Anders raised his eyes slowly, following the lines of Fenris’s body up to the sharp angle of his chin and jaw, as if reading some dense text that would unlock a long-hidden secret. His blood felt sluggish and luxuriant, like sweet syrup oozing through his veins and pooling in his groin. He nudged his hips against Fenris’s, brushing his own erection against the elf’s hesitantly, almost shyly, expecting Fenris at any moment to break out of the blissful trance Anders’s magic had enveloped him in and backhand him across the face like he had that night behind the Chantry. 

But Fenris just moaned louder, his neck stretching as his head lolled from side to side against the wall. Anders couldn’t look away from that pale, curving ladder of lyrium on the elf’s throat, each line of it like a harp string he could pluck with his magic – he imagined the lyrium’s song swelling until it filled the entire alley with its pulsing thrum. His hand shaking, he flicked the threads of magic over the lyrium markings. They forked down into the pale lines like minute bolts of lightning, and the tattoo blazed with pale blue light, the Fade calling out to itself like an echoing voice. 

Fenris groaned, a sharp groan of pain that seemed to originate somewhere deep within him and tear at his throat on its way out, and the sound drowned out the song of the lyrium, jerking Anders out of his reverie. The magic winked out of his fingers, and he stepped back, pulling his coat around himself to hide his erection. Fenris sank to the ground, knees drawn up to his chest. His breath whistled through teeth clenched as if to hold back any more cries of pain, but the tightness of his face and the glare he directed up at Anders showed he was still feeling it and that he blamed Anders for it. 

“I’m sorry,” Anders blurted. “I…” What could he say that wouldn’t condemn him, and by extension all mages, in Fenris’s eyes? _Sorry, I was thinking with my cock? Sorry, I was overwhelmed by being that close to another person?_ It hadn’t been the magic’s fault – it had been his, for being enthralled by how Fenris’s pulse had made the tattoos on his neck ripple and flutter, for enjoying the sensation of Fenris’s hot, rapid breath on his cheek. And it had been Fenris’s fault for asking in the first place. 

Anders stood there, feeling flayed by Fenris’s angry green glance. He swallowed hard and willed his voice to be steady. “I let that go on for too long. You, uh, seemed to be enjoying yourself, and…” 

Fenris’s face flushed at that, though Anders couldn’t tell if it was from embarrassment or anger. In spite of his abandon in fights, it seemed rare for the elf to fully lose control of himself – maybe the constant pain of his lyrium markings made him too perpetually self-aware for that, a thought that made Anders’s own cheeks color with embarrassment. _The first time you get him off his guard, and you go straight for what made him mistrust mages in the first place._ He’d been selfish and weak, and worse, he’d confirmed what Fenris already thought of mages in general and him in particular. 

“And then I got… distracted.” _Don’t say by his cock, don’t say by his cock._ “You know, tiredness, worry about the apprentices,” he blathered on, not sounding convincing to his own ears even, and berating himself for sounding as if he were turning it all on Fenris… though, again, he _had_ been the one to ask to see the trick. _When he was drunk. And he didn’t ask for_ that. _A quick brush of electricity just to give him some goosebumps, that would have been enough. Working him up to the point of being willing to dry-hump in an alley was well beyond the pale._ Hurting him _was well beyond the pale._ “It certainly wasn’t my intention to cause you pain.” 

Fenris sneered up at him. “Of course not,” he said, his voice like the surprisingly low, rumbling growl of a cornered cat. He pushed himself to his feet, sliding up the wall as if to stay as far away from Anders as possible. Anders took a step back, putting his hands up, though he realized that wasn’t a non-threatening pose when coming from a mage and let them fall back to his sides. 

“I really am sorry,” Anders said, forcing out the words with an effort that Fenris must have been able to hear. “You’ve been… very kind to me today, and I should have been more careful.” He fought the temptation to put all the blame on Justice, who _had_ been lured by the sweet beckoning of the lyrium, but that would have led to more abomination talk, which was nearly as bad as Fenris’s usual harping on mages. 

“I should go,” Fenris muttered. Back on his feet, he seemed unwilling to make eye contact with Anders, keeping his head turned to one side, eyes obscured by crescent-shaped locks of hair that shone like the moon in the dim alley so that Anders could only make out the ragged edge of his dark eyelashes. They cast diffuse shadows on cheeks that looked soft and fine-grained, like suede with most of the nap worn off. 

“I suppose you consider an apology from a mage meaningless, is that it?” he said. “For Andraste’s sake, you _did_ ask.” 

Fenris looked at him then, a quick cut of his eyes up to Anders’s face, and Anders flinched back from that glance as if from a swung fist. “I need to go,” Fenris insisted through gritted teeth and without another word, he walked toward the mouth of the alley and was swallowed by the billow of chokedamp. 

Anders slumped against the alley wall, scrubbing his hands over his face. The last knotted threads of his arousal unraveled, a relief and a disappointment. He didn’t know _why_ he had done it. Even the being deprived of physical contact excuse he’d tried to concoct for himself didn’t wash – he’d barely even touched Fenris, other than with magic. True, sometimes when he was tapped into the Fade and Fenris’s markings were glowing, he felt like he could delve into Fenris in a way that was satisfying mostly to Justice but that unnerved Anders more than anything. He’d already merged with one entity, and that was more than enough. 

What he didn’t want to think about, what his mind kept glancing off like sword thrusts off a heavy shield, was that he had enjoyed the control he’d had over Fenris, the power he’d exerted over the elf’s breath, his blood, his entire body. Healing was similar, he supposed, but that had a noble purpose, a goal, and he was grappling with injury or disease – they were what he was controlling, not a strange, prickly, tattooed elf. Control over another living, conscious being should have disgusted him – he liked to think that he shared control of his own body with Justice even – it was too similar to what he claimed to fight against. Circle mages had next to no control over their own lives, and Fenris, he imagined, had had even less. The realization left a sour taste on his tongue, and he spat onto the alley floor to try to rid himself of it. 

The little crackles of residual magic in the air seemed to taunt him, so he headed back toward Darktown, trudging head down as if through heavy snow. As he walked, he kept turning the incident over and over in his head like it was a puzzle he could figure out if only he could see it from every angle. It had to be the allure of control, the knowing that Fenris would hate being laid bare by a mage, especially at his own request. Yet that would make Anders no better than the templars who had imprisoned him at the Circle, exploiting every weakness and vulnerability so ruthlessly that he had learned to close himself off to anything that could be used against him – friendship, love, cat ownership. 

Or he thought he had. Sometimes he felt like a stray ember carried on the wind, looking for something to catch on. It seemed that dry, brittle things worked best, and Fenris was like pile of summer-parched kindling waiting to go up. _But why_ him? he asked himself. _He hates you. He’s threatened to kill you every time you’ve seen him._ But maybe it didn’t matter. 

That was the old Anders talking, the person he’d been before Justice had made him realize his own selfishness and shortsightedness, before he’d taken Justice into his own body. That Anders would happily use Fenris for a few days or weeks until the fuel of the elf’s novelty had burnt itself out. He hadn’t always been that way, he thought; it hadn’t always been about consumption. With Karl, it had been like the barn fire that had gotten him sent to the Circle – an accidental conflagration that had ended with Anders brooding and alone, sudden and too intense to control. For Anders to control, that is. For Karl, it had been friendship that strayed from its course, driven by youthful curiosity and the hunger of lonely, touch-starved bodies for any kind of contact. Maybe it was that, more than the admonitions of the Circle not to fraternize with other mages, that had transformed Anders into the selfish, always consuming man he’d been when he had met Justice. 

As he descended into the fetid mist of Darktown, he decided. He’d never see Fenris again.


	8. Chapter 8

“Don’t they have locks in Hightown?”

Fenris jerked awake and bolted upright, eyes snapping open to scan the room for the voice’s owner. It wasn’t the sneering, nasal simper of Danarius, at least, the one that dogged his nightmares and lingered in his ears long after he’d woken up – even doing the most mundane tasks, he imagined he could hear the disappointed click of Danarius’s tongue. He leapt out of bed, trying to disentangle his legs from the blankets as he dove for his sword. His markings were already turning the dust motes, sent spinning into the air by his movement, into tiny blue sparks before he saw Anders sitting on the bench in front of the fireplace, cradling a cat in his arms, long fingers deftly scratching between its ears. 

“I think they are assuming that people have manners,” he said, letting his markings go out and propping his sword back against the wall. It wasn’t that he didn’t consider Anders a threat exactly, but he also had a feeling that Anders would rather use his hands to pet a cat than to call any of his magic down on Fenris. He thought of the last magic Anders had worked on him and felt himself coloring. The pain of it in the lyrium under his skin had nagged him as he’d hurried through Kirkwall, trying to put as much distance between himself and the Undercity as possible, that needling burn, as if he were being scratched over and over by a piece of jagged metal. 

But by the time he’d arrived at the mansion, the pain had leached away, leaving only the feeling of half-satisfied hunger that had filled him in the alley. He hadn’t made it as far as the stairs before he’d taken himself in his hand, heated forehead pressed against the cool stone wall, and stroked himself with quick, efficient jerks. Privacy had been almost nonexistent in Minrathous, and he’d learned to bring himself off quickly in a few stolen moments when the urge became too great; he had looked on it as any other bodily function that had to be taken care of. But even after he’d finished and stood there, hearing his breath slow and watching his come trail down the wall like beads of quicksilver in the moonlight, Fenris could still feel Anders’s magic crackling through his veins, and every fiber of him seemed to turn toward Darktown, toward the call of that magic. He had been touched by magic in that way before, by Danarius and by Hadriana when she thought Danarius wouldn’t find out, and Fenris knew he should have recoiled from it – he’d promised himself that he’d never let magic be used on him for that purpose again. He should have felt angry or disgusted with himself for having allowed it, for having _asked_ for it, but he didn’t. All he felt were the dregs of arousal leaching through his body and a vague excitement of having discovered something and looking forward to having it again. Maybe that was the difference? The asking and being given rather than being told and then being used. Anders had acquiesced to his wishes, even tried to warn him, to balk; he had done it _for_ Fenris, not _to_ him, and not for himself. 

Though Fenris didn’t believe for a moment that Anders hadn’t gotten anything out of it. He could still see the mage’s face as it had looked in the moment before he’d closed his eyes – an expression of fascination, wonder almost, eyes wide, lips parted, and yet with a tinge of contentment or satisfaction in it. That expression had started to replace Danarius in his dreams in the weeks that followed – he’d begun to sink into sleep as if it were a warm bath instead of forcing himself into an ever-vigilant half-wakefulness to stay on his guard, which was probably why he hadn’t noticed Anders’s arrival that morning. The mage wasn’t stealthy at all in his heavy boots; he must have been a disaster in the Deep Roads, clomping around and alerting every Darkspawn in the vicinity to his presence. Fenris sat back down on the bed and pulled the blankets back over his lap, hoping that the mage would just assume he was cold. “What do you want?” 

Anders stared down at the cat in his arms as he answered; Fenris could hear the deep, contented thrum of its purr even over the sound of Anders’s voice. “Well, if I had known you were letting these sweet little kitty cats gnaw on the corpses in your main hall, I would have come sooner to give them some milk and dried mackerel.” His voice sweetened to almost a coo as he addressed the cat. “Yes, I would have!” 

Fenris rolled his eyes and stood up, presenting his back to the mage as he buckled on his armor. He didn’t quite trust himself to look at Anders – what if he saw something in Fenris’s face, some guilty shift of the eyes or flush on the cheek, and guessed everything? “I can assume that you want something, can I not?” he asked as if Anders hadn’t spoken. “You don’t seem to be one for social calls.” 

“To be fair, you don’t seem to be one for receiving them,” Anders replied. “Well, except for the unlocked door. That was quite hospitable.” 

The brightness in his voice made Fenris glance over his shoulder at him. The mage’s moods and expressions were like the weather at the docks, where the sun weaved between angry-looking clouds, their bellies dark with rain, making the light unsteady, vacillating between blindingly bright and dim as dusk. He thought some of it could be put down to the spirit or demon inside of Anders, but sometimes the mage pendulumed between moods without his eyes turning to pits of blue fire or his voice taking on that added resonance that meant that Justice – or whatever it was – had taken control. 

Anders’s face clouded over again, and he leaned over to gently place the cat on the floor by his feet, giving it a final stroke down its back before it ran away. Fenris’s shoulder blades twitched, a ripple going up his spine between them, as if that hand had been running down his back rather than the cat’s. 

“Now that you mention it,” Anders said in a low voice that was too casual, too carefully absent, “I _do_ need your help.” 

Fenris turned to face him, crossing his arms over his chest and tapping one pointed steel fingertip against his other gauntlet. “Of course. I haven’t seen you in weeks, and now you sneak into my house to ask for my help.” He had been the one to leave the last time they had seen one another and without much explanation at that, but at the time, he hadn’t known how to explain his behavior even if he’d been willing to. Cheap rum mixed with embarrassment and anger at himself and Anders had made an even less appetizing stew than the one served at the Hanged Man, and he’d left that Lowtown alley with his stomach twisted and knotting with it, and what had happened in the intervening weeks had done little to calm that roil of uneasiness. 

Anders jerked his head up to look at Fenris, surprise quickly swept away by a tiny, maddening grin that accentuated the diagonal pleats at the corners of his mouth. “Careful, Fenris. I might start thinking you missed me.” 

“What do you want?” Fenris repeated. Being ignored usually seemed to amuse Anders almost as much as sarcasm did, but this time Anders blinked, nearly a flinch, and a look of disappointment tightened his face before it was smoothed away. 

“It’s the apprentices,” he replied, suddenly businesslike. “Mistress Selby located the families of the ones from Kirkwall, and we thought it better that they go to their homes and let the templars find them there.” His voice dropped, and Fenris thought he heard the distant boom of Justice roll through it. “I would rather the templars didn’t find them at all, but it’s harder to get apprentices out.” 

“So what do you need from me?” Fenris asked. Anders glanced up at him, the early sun shining through the windows catching his eyes and turning them the color of honey. For a moment, Fenris saw again the child Anders must have been, had been too briefly. “Not that I’ve agreed to anything.” 

“We have to get the rest of them back into the Gallows with as few templars as possible finding out,” Anders said. “Some of my, uh, contacts have found an underground passage into the Gallows, and one of the apprentices – Olivia, the sort of… intense, feverish-looking one? – has a templar father who might be willing to cover for them if anyone starts to ask questions.” 

Fenris remembered Olivia, with her long, sharp face and her fingers that kept straying toward her belt knife, and thought that if anything went awry in that passage, Anders might have an abomination to deal with on top of templars and a flock of panicked apprentices. Though his _spirit_ would probably be drawn out by such a catastrophe, so it would be the templars and apprentices with _two_ abominations on their hands. And Fenris. He could see where Anders was going with this. “You need a bodyguard?” 

“It was actually Lirene’s suggestion,” Anders said. A brief dart of disappointment pierced Fenris. Anders hadn’t wanted to see him at all – he probably would’ve preferred to hire mercenaries if he could have scraped together the coin. “I didn’t think you wanted to…” Anders trailed off, clearing his throat. “She actually insisted.” He tilted his head back, as if he were looking down at Fenris from a great height, and his voice became chilly and stilted yet commanding, exactly as Fenris remembered Lirene’s. “’Why not ask your elvhen friend? He seems quite capable.’” He dropped the cold voice and smiled. “That was her ringing endorsement. And she’s right – the tunnels have been known to be used by lyrium smugglers, so I would prefer to have some, um, muscle with me,” he said. 

Fenris felt his glance skim up his thighs and over his arms. He couldn’t remember having been sold to Danarius, but he imagined there being a look of similar appraisal then, of envisioning what he could be used for, his body a tool and nothing else. And yet he knew that was unfair on Anders, that the mage would be appalled by the mere thought, and – worse – he realized that he had been preening under that gaze, tightening his biceps and shifting his weight from foot to foot. 

“It will be dangerous,” Anders continued, but his voice was distracted, sluggish. He blinked, shook himself, and went on, looking down at the cat nuzzling his ankles. “But I’ve seen what you can do, and I think we can manage between the two of us.” 

“When are you planning to do this?” 

“As soon as possible,” Anders said with a tired sigh. “Tonight, if you’re able. Every day we have the apprentices at the clinic, the more likely it will be that the templars discover it. I’m sure I’ve become something of a known secret, but I’d rather not antagonize them… for now.” 

The last two words left a chill in the air, like a rime of frost hinting at heavy snow to come. Fenris cleared his throat to break the silence more than anything else and nodded at the cat by Anders’s feet. “Do you want to take it with you?” 

“What? The cat?” Anders asked, reaching toward the animal to pet it again before snatching his hand away. “No, I couldn’t. There’s no place for him at the clinic.” His eyebrows pinched together, the brief look of hopefulness and surprise that Fenris realized he’d been trying to conjure up with his offer collapsing quickly into one of regret. “Have they got names?” 

“I’ve been letting them eat corpses. Do you really think I’ve bothered to name them?” Fenris replied. 

“Fair point,” Anders said, leaning over to scratch the cat under the chin. A few more sauntered into the room, as if drawn by the contented purrs. “Could I then?” 

“Ser Pounce-a-Lot the Second?” Fenris suggested. Anders raised an eyebrow at him, looking at him sideways as if surprised he’d remembered. “A name that foolish is difficult to forget.” 

With a sigh, Anders shook his head. “It wouldn’t do anyway. Each cat has its own personality, so each cat must have its own name.” He pointed at a large white cat in the corner, gnawing on what appeared to be a human finger bone with as much vigor as a Mabari. “That one could be Knight-Commander Meowedith.” He frowned. “Though it seems cruel to name an innocent animal after that raging she-beast.” As he spoke, a gray cat slipped past Knight-Commander Meowedith, only to have the white cat leap on it and viciously box its ears, sending the gray off in a howling streak. “Cruel but apt.” 

Fenris settled on the end of his bed and watched Anders name the cluster of cats that milled about him, butting their heads against him affectionately. A tabby was given the title “Lord McKittington”, followed by “The Venerable Toe-Bean”, “Mister Pudding-Paws”, and “the Viscount of Catwall”. 

“Do you want to name one?” Anders asked. “There’s that great fat beasty sleeping in the corner who still needs a name.” 

“’Fat beast’ won’t do?” Fenris replied, rolling his eyes. “Very well. ‘Soporatus’. It means ‘sleeper’ in Tevene, and I have never seen a lazier creature than that cat.” 

“Well, it’s better than something like ‘Frederick’, I suppose,” Anders said, winning over Knight-Commander Meowedith with a few well-placed scratches under her chin. 

Fenris offered a hand to Lord McKittington, and the cat rapturously rubbed its head against the pointed tip of his gauntlet. “Do you really think names are that important?” he asked, trying to duplicate that too-casual, uninterested voice Anders had used earlier. Danarius had named him his little wolf, and at the time it had almost been a source of pride, but now it had become a burden, yoking him to his past life while hindering the empty space that was his life before the ritual that gave him his markings from being filled in. He could see the suitability of his name to a point, but the feeling of having one’s identity determined by someone else, especially someone like his former master, was discomfiting. How could he be sure that Danarius had named him for what he actually was rather than what he wanted him to be or would shape him to be? 

Anders’s head was bowed over whichever newly christened cat was in his lap; Fenris watched as the morning sun sent ripples of lighter gold over his hair. “I don’t know.” He looked up at Fenris with a smile tempered with sadness. “Maybe names say more about the people doing the naming than the one being named.” 

“What was your name supposed to say about you?” Fenris asked. _What does mine say about me?_ he wondered. Viciousness? Implacability? Wildness? And yet the “little” part of it reminded him that he was a pet, a plaything. 

“That my father was from the Anderfels,” Anders replied with a little shrug that looked to Fenris more like a twitch of discomfort. The mage’s voice had thinned and become brittle, like a thread of melted sugar pulled to the point of snapping. 

Fenris frowned. He didn’t remember his own family beyond a few half-formed shadows in the deepest cellars of his memory, a distant peal of a girl’s laughter here, work-hardened hands smoothing the hair back from his forehead there. The origin of Anders’s name seemed odd to him – could human families be that much different? He knew lineage and titles were important to them, but Anders didn’t seem to be descended from nobility. If anything, he seemed contemptuous of the rich and the noble of Hightown. “Why did your parents choose it?” he asked hesitantly. 

Anders appeared so engrossed in scratching behind the Viscount of Catwall’s ears that Fenris thought he hadn’t heard, but finally he said, “They didn’t.” Then he stood, so abruptly that he dislodged several cats who had been lolling on his lap. “I should go. Can I expect you tonight? The entrance to the Gallows dungeon is near my clinic, so we can meet there.” He waited a moment for Fenris’s nod and then left without another word, walking so quickly that the cats had to scurry to stay at his heels. 

****************

“My father is Ser Thrask. He is a tall man, with hair and whiskers that are red like mine,” Olivia told them in her harried, breathy voice that made her sound as if she were always running from place to place. “He will meet you at the entrance to the Gallows.” 

“Are you sure you won’t come with us, Olivia?” Anders asked. “The Blight may be over, but Ferelden is still no place for a young….” 

She fastened her wide green eyes on him so intently that he jerked back from her gaze. “No, I must go. I must leave Kirkwall,” she spat. “For my father. That was our agreement.” 

Anders glanced at Fenris as if appealing for help, but Fenris shrugged. While he didn’t wish any of the apprentices to come to any harm, he didn’t fully trust Olivia either. Not that he trusted _any_ mage, but the other apprentices still seemed young enough to have so far avoided the corruption that magic always seemed to bring with it. Not so Olivia. She had the twitchy, darting-eyed look of someone willing to do anything to escape. He remembered it well in himself, that feeling of being stretched too far, like a string in an over-tuned lute. 

Finally, with a sigh, Anders put his hands up in a placating gesture that Fenris recognized from the many times it had been directed at him. “Fine. One of my connections will find you a place on a ship out of Kirkwall as soon as possible. It’s the least I can do for your help with this.” 

Olivia gave a curt nod, and Fenris noticed her spindly fingers relaxing around the hilt of her belt knife. Maybe she would find herself in Tevinter somehow and her seeming eagerness to use blood magic would earn her a place with a magister, but he couldn’t help but wonder at the desperation that could have caused her willingness to make a deal with a demon at so young an age. _Wouldn’t you have done anything to escape Danarius?_ he asked himself. Olivia wasn’t interested in power like the mages of Tevinter always had been – all she seemed to care about was leaving Kirkwall for the sake of a father who had been a party to her imprisonment. The South may have thought itself morally superior in the eyes of Andraste and the Maker for its lack of slavery, but Fenris realized that the decay had gone just as deep as it had in Tevinter, only out of sight. 

“A templar with a mage daughter,” Anders muttered when Olivia had walked away. “See? This is the kind of rank hypocrisy we have to deal with.” 

“What do we do if we get to the Gallows and it is not Ser Thrask waiting?” Fenris asked, not wanting to embark on a discussion of hypocrisy with a blood-magic-hating abomination or, indeed, to examine whether that was even what Anders truly was. It had been easier when he could simply classify him as a mage and therefore a threat, an enemy, but every time he’d seen Anders had been like a greasy handprint pressed onto a mirror, obscuring his own image of himself, as well as his image of Anders. And what had happened in the Lowtown alley had cracked the mirror, if not shattered it altogether. Now when he looked into it, he saw many versions of himself staring back, something he was unaccustomed to. For so long, he had just been a slave, Danarius’s little wolf. 

“We kill them all,” Anders replied, his voice as flat and dull as an old coin. Fenris suppressed a shiver at the hollowness of it – it felt as if a cold hand were brushing the back of his neck with clammy fingers. 

“Is that wise?” he asked, glancing at the small group of apprentice mages huddled near the front door of the clinic, waiting to be led to their fate. Fenris turned back to find Anders staring at him from under lowered brows, his face tight. He hadn’t thought those warm amber-brown eyes could be that cold – his own reflection looked trapped like an insect within them. 

“It is just,” Anders said, and Fenris could hear his two voices sliding over one another. If Justice was already this close to the surface, Anders must have been clinging to control by a hair’s breadth, and Fenris doubted very much that the apprentices would let themselves be shepherded through underground tunnels by a thundering, fire-eyed abomination. 

“Perhaps we should do this another time,” he suggested carefully, but Anders cut him off with an impatient shake of his head. 

“No, it’s already too dangerous for them to be here. My contacts have told me that their phylacteries have been found. If we don’t move tonight, we may not have another chance.”


	9. Chapter 9

The apprentices balked at being led into the tunnels, and Fenris couldn’t say he blamed them. As he handed them down to Anders through the narrow wooden opening in Darktown, he felt as if time had reversed and he was putting them back into the hold of the slaver ship he had rescued them from weeks earlier. Maybe, in a way, he was. Their hands were soft, mostly smaller than his, hands that had never done a day of manual labor, hands that wouldn’t help them make their way in the world outside the Circle. He’d barely spoken to most of them since the day he’d brought them to Anders, but the faint image of a slight, sad girl, faded as a painting left in an attic, kept floating through the haze of his lost memory, bringing with it a surge of protectiveness that he didn’t quite understand.

“If there’s any danger, stay behind me,” he told them. “I won’t let any harm come to you.” _Except the harm of sending them back to live in captivity_ , a voice whispered in his head. His conscience had started to sound more and more like Anders. Wonderful. _It’s the safest way_ , he told himself, _better than a life as a slave in the Imperium_. Though maybe it wasn’t. They were mages, after all, and would have been prized by any magister or noble house. _You were prized too, though. It was still not freedom_. 

Fitful candles in hanging lanterns lit the tunnels at irregular intervals, obscuring more than illuminating as their wavering flames stretched shadows long on the rough stone walls, twisting innocent shapes into threats. Evidence of the lyrium smugglers that infested the passages was strewn everywhere – crates, broken wagons, and, worst of all, corpses. The stench of decay mingled with the wet, green smell of the ferns they trampled underfoot and the dry, hard odors of old, splintering wood and hewn stone. Every pile of bones or distant chitter of a giant spider set the apprentices tittering with fear all over again, and soon they were following Fenris so closely that they were practically treading on his heels with every step. 

He kept his eyes fixed on Anders as the mage led them up and down flights of wooden stairs that creaked and groaned under their weight, and through narrow tunnels whose walls were shored up haphazardly with more rotten planks. Creatures skittered in the darkness, but nothing approached them, and the lyrium smugglers’ abandoned wagons were veiled with dust and cobwebs, hinting that they’d found a new way of delivering the precious “dust” to the templars. 

Though he knew it was foolish, he felt as if staring so intently at Anders’s back would keep the mage from being swallowed by the gloom and leaving Fenris alone with the apprentices. How many times had he wished Anders _would_ disappear? No more sarcastic, smirky replies that made Fenris feel tongue-tied, no more self-righteous, dismissive moralizing about mages, no more brain-fogging tricks with electricity. A pale glimpse of Anders’s neck showed above the collar of his coat, winking in and out of sight as he walked, white and vulnerable and lapped by the shorter, finer golden hair that wasn’t tied up. If Fenris had reached out his hand, he could have brushed it with the tip of his gauntlet, could have activated the lyrium in his markings and severed the mage’s spine with a flick of a finger… but that was a hollow thought, so empty of motivation that it almost surprised him to have it. The memory of Anders’s magic climbing up his skin, though, the memory of his breath on Fenris’s cheek made the thought of caressing that pale stripe of flesh much less surprising. He curled his fingers into fists, clenching them so tightly that the clawed fingertips of his gauntlets dug into the lyrium markings on his palms. The pain brought him back to himself a little; he had a job to do, and fantasizing about Anders – whether it was killing him or something else – was not it. 

Finally, they reached a doorway that opened onto another fern-filled clearing, this one with a stone staircase leading up and out of sight. Over Anders’s shoulder, Fenris could make out the silhouette of a handful of armored men. 

“Ser Thrask?” he murmured to Anders. “Olivia did not say he would bring help.” 

A flicker of blue in the murky light told him that Justice was suspicious as well, though it winked out quickly, and he heard Anders whisper, “No, no, this is their place. We cannot,” to himself… or to Justice. Whomever the words had been intended for, they sounded like a warning. The mage took a hesitant step forward, into the flickering lantern light of the clearing, and Fenris followed, gesturing for the apprentices to stay in the tunnel. The silhouettes resolved themselves into separate men, hard-faced and cold-eyed, and not one of them with red hair. 

“I am looking for Ser Thrask,” Anders said, and Fenris could hear Justice in his voice, like the pounding of a great drum heard from far away. He wondered how much control of the spirit Anders _did_ have – it sometimes seemed as if Anders could summon him, don him like a suit of armor. 

One of the templars, a Knight-Lieutenant whose face appeared to be mostly chin, swaggered up to Anders, lip curled in a sneer. “Ser Thrask is indisposed at the moment.” He looked past Anders, beady eyes narrowing even more as he squinted toward the doorway where the apprentices were hiding. “We’ll take those robes off your hands. They’re going to learn their lesson.” 

Fenris started to reach over his shoulder for his sword, light from his markings gleaming through his clothing, haloing him in pale blue. He thought he caught a glimmer of fear in the templar’s eyes, but the man’s sneer deepened, and he said, “I wouldn’t, if I were you. The rest of my regiment is waiting in the dungeons for my signal.” The man glanced over his shoulder, gesturing to his companions. “Round up the apprentices. We can prepare for the Rite of Tranquility as soon as I take care of these two.” 

The smell of flint hitting steel filled Fenris’s nostrils, and tendrils of smoke like black wires wove through the air around Anders. Fissures of blue fire gaped over his skin, and Fenris didn’t have to hear his voice to know that Anders was gone. He felt Justice draw on his markings, and flame wreathed the mage’s hands. 

“Apostate!” the templars cried, rushing toward Justice with their swords drawn. 

“Seize him!” the Knight-Lieutenant shouted, but the words were broken off into a gurgle as Fenris darted forward and ripped out his throat. The other templars advanced even through the spray of their leader’s blood. 

“You fiends will never touch a mage again!” Justice bellowed and swung his staff at the charging templars. Two of them erupted in flame, shrieking as they were cooked alive in their heavy armor. 

Drawn by their screams, templars streamed down the stone stairs from the Gallows dungeons above. Fenris flitted among them, hacking heads from bodies, tearing hearts from chests, and everywhere he went, Justice’s flames followed close behind, raining from the ceiling of the cavern. He knew Anders thought of him as a wild beast when he fought, but he always felt himself fully in control, efficient, a master at his craft. And now, if anyone was wild, it was Anders, who was raving in Justice’s rolling voice as he called down torrents of fire and great gusts of frigid air that froze the templars to the ground. Fenris’s skin prickled as magic sutured his wounds shut – it was a measure of how much Anders had lost himself that he had forgotten to wait for Fenris’s request to work his healing spells. 

“I will have every last templar for these abuses!” Justice raged, even as the flow of templars from the dungeons slowed like blood from a staunched wound. 

Piles of dead and dying templars lay at their feet, twitching as the flames that had consumed them died along with them, the stone floor greasy and slick with blood. From the tunnel, Fenris heard muffled sobbing and hysterical high-pitched whispers that he could catch only ragged snatches of. He grasped Justice’s arm, hoping that the touch would bring Anders back. 

“We must get the apprentices out of here. Get a hold of yourself,” he murmured. 

Justice followed him toward the tunnel – Fenris thought he could feel the fire that had swallowed Anders’s eyes boring into his back. It illuminated the apprentices, who looked like panicked doves in their white hoods, huddled together. A few of them dared a frightened glance, usually hiding their faces again as soon as they saw the glowing cracks in Anders’s skin, the coruscation of blue sparks flashing where his eyes had been. 

“Get that demon away from us!” one girl yelped, burying her face in another apprentice’s shoulder, her back quivering with sobs. 

“I am no demon!” Justice rumbled, advancing on the apprentices. Fenris grabbed his shoulder to pull him back, digging the claws of his gauntlet in hard enough to touch flesh, but the mage shrugged him off. “Are you one of them, that you would call me such?” 

“They’re mages, like you! Would you threaten your own kind?” Fenris asked. 

“I can feel the templars’ hold on them!” Justice insisted. He turned his gaze on the cowering apprentices. “They will do their masters’ will.” 

“They were trying to escape! Maker, haven’t you been paying attention?” Fenris said, trying to slip between Anders and the young mages. His markings flashed, their blue melding with the glow sheeting off Anders. He hoped the lyrium would distract the spirit as it had before or at least startle Justice enough for Anders to wrestle back control, but the spirit using Anders’s body to work its will raised the mage’s hands, black smoke whirling around his fists. The apprentices’ pleas for mercy turned to shrieks of terror, and panic – an unaccustomed sensation for Fenris – bubbled up inside him, the taste of bile bitter on his tongue. Electricity simmered in the air, purple bolts of it arcing off Anders’s body. How much longer before he directed it at the apprentices? 

“ _Fasta vass_!” Fenris cursed and jabbed one glowing fist into Anders’s abdomen. Years of practice had given him the anatomical knowledge and dexterity of a healer – he knew how to inflict incapacitating pain while avoiding any vital organs – and he slid his hand into Anders, twisting it just until the mage sank to the floor, the cracks in his skin flickering as they died. Fenris turned to the apprentices, not knowing how much time he had before – or if – Justice revived. 

“Go!” he shouted, but as they started climbing to their feet, he realized that he couldn’t send children into the blood-soaked cavern where the templars had died. They were edging toward the doorway, most of them trying to not look at his gauntlet that dripped with Anders’s blood. He stopped one of the older ones and said, “I’ll lead you out. Do you know your way back to the mages’ quarters from here?” The young man nodded, his eyes wide and rolling with fear. “Good. If you get caught, tell them…” He floundered; he didn’t know enough of the Circle or the templars to think of an adequate lie. “Tell them Olivia tricked you.” The girl would be on a ship by now, heading far from Kirkwall with any luck – what did it matter if she was blamed for leading a few younger apprentices astray? 

The young mage nodded again, and Fenris hoped that some of it would stick in the boy’s terror-addled mind. 

He raised his voice, addressing the entire group. “I can take you as far as the Gallows dungeon entrance. Follow me – don’t turn your heads, don’t look around.” Their panicked, eager nods told him they were willing to brave the Gallows on their own rather than spend another minute with even an unconscious Anders. They all but tiptoed past him as if he were a sleeping dragon. As they passed, Fenris checked for the rise and fall of Anders’s breath, and felt a twinge of relief when he saw the feathers of his pauldrons fluttering with his exhalations. 

Fenris led the line of apprentices up the stone stairs toward the entrance to the Gallows, shoulders hunched in anticipation of the moment when they saw the charred and twisted remains of their former captors, but they followed him carefully, slowly, and silently. He felt like he should have said something to them as they filed past him, given them some kind of encouragement or reassurance, but anything he could have said would’ve sounded hollow and untrue to their ears and his own. When the last apprentice had disappeared into the dank gloom of the dungeons, he turned with a sigh and headed back toward the crumpled shadow that was Anders. 

If not for the spreading patch of blood darkening the front of his coat, Anders could have been sleeping, his breath slow and regular, and his face…. Other than a fleeting indentation between his brows that looked as if an invisible fingernail were pressing into the skin there, Anders’s face was smooth, relaxed, all the worried tightness that pinched it into lines as fine as pinbones gone. His full lips twitched almost into a pout as Fenris watched – maybe somewhere deep in his mind, he was arguing with Justice, but outwardly, he just seemed to be dreaming. 

“I’m sorry,” Fenris said, kneeling and sweeping sweat-and-blood-soaked hair from Anders’s forehead and cheeks. The mage’s eyelids fluttered, a crescent of white showing beneath them. With any luck, he was still totally unconscious, beyond the reach of Fenris’s muttered words. Just because Fenris felt impelled to say them didn’t mean he wanted Anders to hear them. “You’ll be glad I did it when you wake up. You would have regretted it if I hadn’t.” 

He lifted Anders’s head and rested it on his lap, then took a potion out of his belt pouch and flicked the cork out of it with his thumb. He’d started keeping a few potions and poultices on him, even though he’d yet to use one on himself. It had always just been easier to go to Anders’s clinic as long as he was able to walk. The mage’s stubble rasped against his bare palm as he cupped Anders’s chin and tilted his head back to pour the potion down his throat. Without thinking, he dabbed at the potion dribbling out of the corners of Anders’s lips with the pad of his thumb. 

After a few moments, Anders’s eyes shot open – Fenris was relieved to see the honey-brown of the irises rather than vortices of blue sparks – and he arched upward, sputtering as if cold water had been thrown over him. Then he collapsed onto the stone floor, panting, his eyes darting every which way, lighting on Fenris’s face only to flit away again, as if he couldn’t see him or couldn’t believe he was there. 

“Fenris?” he gasped. The question in his voice was clear to Fenris’s ears. 

“We should be gone, mage. The templars will soon miss that many of their number,” he said, knowing that he should have been easing the mage’s head out of his lap, helping him up, dragging him out of the tunnels. 

“The apprentices? Are they…? Did I…?” Anders’s voice broke, and he swallowed so hard that Fenris felt it in the hand he still had cupped around the mage’s chin. “Maker, what have I done?” 

“Killed enough templars to be made Tranquil ten times over, at least,” Fenris replied, gently nudging Anders’s head out of his lap and standing up. “The apprentices are safe. No thanks to your demon, I should point out,” he added, knowing that he was risking another appearance from Justice, swelling with righteous indignation at being named for what he was. 

But instead of sprouting fiery blue cracks over his skin, Anders just covered his face with his hands and rolled onto his side, curling in on himself. Fenris heard a cry, muffled by his hands, a half-sob, half-groan that was almost animal in its helpless despair. A wavering gleam of pity, uncertain as a candle flame in a stiff breeze, rose in him. Though he was in total control of his body when fighting, he knew that controlling his emotions was another matter – he knew that anger, that helplessness, the rage of years taken from him, and he heard a faint echo of it in Anders. He crouched down beside the mage and rested his hand on his feather-covered shoulder, a light touch and nothing more – patting him would have been uncomfortable for both of them, no doubt. 

“Perhaps it’s time you realized your limitations,” he said. 

Anders glared up at him between his fingers, his bloodshot eye livid beside the white of them. “Yes, go ahead! Beat me while I’m down.” 

Fenris rolled his eyes and stood up. “It was a suggestion, not a condemnation,” he said. His voice sounded mild and uninterested to his ears, even as annoyance throbbed in his temples like an incipient headache. Then again, wasn’t Anders usually the human personification of a headache? “Can you walk?” 

“You should just leave me here,” Anders replied, as if he had pulled a blanket of self-pity over himself and settled in for the night. “After what I almost did, maybe I deserve for the templars to take me.” 

“At least you can be sure they won’t bother to make you Tranquil before killing you now,” Fenris said. He leaned over and offered Anders his hand. “The cats at the mansion will be disappointed if you never make good on your promise of milk.” 

“What did I _just_ say about beating me while I’m down?” Anders said, the slightest hint of lightness touching his voice. 

“If the templars don’t return, the spiders will. Come on.” He reached toward Anders again, so close he could have skimmed the hair that was veiling Anders’s cheek behind his ear with his fingertips. Not that he would have – he imagined the fine thread-of-gold strands snagged on the harsh gray of his gauntlet. Again, the faint glimmer of a memory brushed against his mind, the one he associated with his mother, now all but forgotten, the graze of a hand on his face, pushing the hair out of his eyes, off his cheeks. 

Fenris wondered why Anders would summon that memory – the need to comfort was not something that affected him; the need to protect once had, a good trait for a bodyguard, but it had been twisted, driven by the knowledge that his own safety was dependent on that of the man he was protecting, rather than by an urge to protect someone valued, loved. If he had felt any care toward his master, it had been a side effect of the ritual that had given him his markings, a lie that made him believe he was special, beloved, rather than just a walking trophy or a parlor trick. Maybe he wanted to comfort Anders because of how pathetic the man looked, curled in a ball on the stone floor – that seemed natural, he supposed, though when he had been Danarius’s creature, he doubted he would have saved a wounded puppy from its tormentors if Danarius hadn’t specifically told him to. 

“It’s a pity they don’t turn on each other,” Anders said. He rolled onto his back and stared blindly at the ceiling for a moment before glancing over at Fenris, scanning him with his eyes from his outstretched hand to the top of his head and back down to his toes. “Do you need healing?” He brushed one hand over the sticky patch of drying blood on the front of his own coat. “Maybe I should be asking myself that.” 

“It was necessary,” Fenris said, though he wasn’t sure if Anders even remembered what had happened. How aware was he when Justice took over? Was he a spectator in his own body, able to watch and remember events but unable to exert any influence over them, or did he disappear into Justice completely, a brief but total hibernation until the spirit ceded control of the body back to Anders? 

Anders’s response of “I know” did nothing to clarify matters, but at least he pushed himself upright and then grasped Fenris’s hand and let him help him to his feet. The mage’s palm pressed against his own, a hard ridge of calluses pushing into his markings as Anders’s fingers gripped his hand. He’d expected Anders’s hands to be softer, in spite of having seen him fighting with his staff in a way that had left no doubt in Fenris’s mind that it was, in fact, a weapon and watching him grind herbs with a mortar and pestle for hours in his clinic. Maybe it was the delicacy with which those hands flitted over his patients that had made Fenris assume that they would be soft, languid, somehow decadent, or maybe it was memories of Danarius’s hands that had planted the idea in his head, but he could feel the strength of Anders’s grip even through his gauntlet as he tugged the mage up. 

Once he was on his feet, though, Anders wouldn’t meet his eyes, keeping his head bowed, his other hand coming up to rest on his forehead, as if to shield him from Fenris’s gaze. He didn’t let go of Fenris’s hand either, but the pressure of his calluses didn’t cause the usual bristle of irritation in his markings, much less pain. Still, Fenris tried to slip his hand out of Anders’s grasp, but the mage held fast. 

“I really didn’t… hurt anyone, did I?” Anders mumbled finally, his voice choked as if someone were gripping his throat as tightly as he was gripping Fenris’s hand. “You would tell me, wouldn’t you? You would have stopped me, even though they were mages?” 

“I _did_ stop you,” Fenris said, yanking his hand out of Anders’s hold. Anders’s fingers flexed around air as if seeking what they had lost. “You – or your _spirit_ – killed only templars.” 

Anders jerked his head up, and the look on his face struck Fenris like a slaver’s maul to the temple. A caul of red capillaries webbed the whites of his eyes, giving the golden brown of the irises a greenish cast like aged brass, and when he tried to speak, his voice broke. “Thank you. Thank you for stopping me.” 

And, to his horror, Anders wrapped his arms around him and embraced him, his stubble tickling his ear as he rested his head against Fenris’s. Fenris flinched away from the contact, trying to step back even as he was pulled into the mage’s arms, engulfed in the odor of blood and sweat and the gaminess of the feathers on his coat. He had never been reached for except to be beaten or somehow used, and even though he had learned to weather both the beatings and the unwanted attentions, the instinct to escape always took him over. He shivered at the contact – in disgust, he told himself – and went rigid in Anders’s arms, hoping that the mage would sense his discomfort and back away, but Anders was still mumbling, “Thank you” in a litany into Fenris’s hair and showed no signs of letting go. 

He knew what embraces were, of course, though he couldn’t remember ever having received one, and he had some idea of what they meant, but none of those ideas corresponded to the situation. Anders was obviously grateful for his intervention, but why weren’t the endlessly repeated thank-yous enough? Fenris’s markings had built a barrier around him – he couldn’t imagine touch being welcome, being a means of expression, and yet for Anders, it seemed to be the first impulse, and he fairly spoke with his body. With Danarius, there had never been any embrace – nor would he have wanted one – he’d been told what to do, where to put his hands, his mouth, and he’d followed orders. It didn’t express anything about him other than perhaps his fear of disobeying his master. 

Still unsure of what was expected of him or even how he felt about this sudden embrace – he hated it, didn’t he? – Fenris raised one arm, following the curve of Anders’s back, until his hand was left hovering uncertainly between the mage’s shoulder blades, close enough for the feathers on his pauldrons to lightly kiss his palm. He could have activated his markings, torn out Anders’s spine, and never been troubled by the mage or his struggles or the confusing feelings he called up in Fenris ever again. 

“Of course I would tell you if you had hurt someone, mage,” he said. “I never miss a chance to tell you when you’re wrong.” 

He heard a little gulping laugh, and then Anders was pulling away, stepping back and wiping his eyes with the heels of his hands. His face looked flushed, wide cheekbones bright with blood, though he kept bowing his head, so Fenris couldn’t be sure. Was he embarrassed? For what? His loss of control? His emotion? Or had he sensed Fenris’s discomfort with being touched? Fenris’s stomach twisted briefly at the thought, like a wet cloth being wrung out, and he felt a surge of that old panic come back, that fear of being displeasing. 

“Well, you’ve got me there,” Anders said. He glanced past Fenris toward the cavern beyond and the tunnel leading to the Gallows dungeon. “It must be a good sign that no more templars have come.” 

“We should not press our luck too far,” Fenris warned, taking a step in the direction of the Darktown tunnel they had entered through. “Perhaps you shouldn’t go back to the clinic either. They’re bound to look for you there first.” 

“But I have a responsibility toward my patients,” Anders protested as they climbed the first flight of rickety wooden steps. Fenris thought he caught the faintest whiff of chokedamp as they ascended. 

“Which you can’t fulfill dead, Tranquil, or imprisoned,” he replied. “Perhaps Lirene can hire some boys to watch for templars during the day.” 

“I don’t have anywhere to go,” Anders murmured. The hopelessness in his voice was like a cold draft gushing through the caverns – goosebumps sprang up on Fenris’s arms to hear it. He remembered Anders telling him about being taken by the templars as a child; the memory of his own capture – if there had been one – was lost to him, and yet he knew that feeling of being lost even in a place where you’d been told that you belonged. _But it’s not the same_ , he reminded himself. _It can’t be the same. He’s a_ mage. 

“For now, you can come to the mansion. There is still a chance that nothing will come of all this,” he said, not really believing his words even as he said them and sensing that Anders knew it. 

The mage gave a short, bitter laugh that bounced off the stone walls and echoed back in a chorus of mocking laughter. “There will always be something,” he said. 

Anders lapsed into a brooding silence after that. Fenris thought of the woman they’d met at the Hanged Man who had called Anders “the moody mage”, and watching Anders struggle up the steps in the tunnels, brow crimped with thought, face tight, he realized he’d never heard a more apt title. Anders’s pace had flagged as they’d gone on, his breath ragged, and Fenris, feeling the slightest twinge of guilt that maybe he hadn’t been as precise as he’d thought, would jog ahead to offer the mage a helping hand up the sagging flights of stairs that led back to Darktown. It had had to be done, of course, but the guilt just made the gratitude on Anders’s face when Fenris tugged him up through the entrance to the tunnel that much more mortifying, and he felt his own cheeks flush with embarrassment. Perhaps being free – at least at first – was going to be a series of embarrassments as he had experiences that free people had every day: being shown gratitude, being embraced, being useful to someone by his own choice rather than out of fear. 

Once they were out of the tunnel, Anders leaned against the lichen-covered walls of Darktown, taking deep breaths of the fetid air that kept Fenris on the point of gagging. His cheeks were clammy, and their usual pallor had a bluish tinge. “I’ll fetch a poultice from the clinic and let the women know where I’ll be,” he said, scrubbing the sweat beaded along his hairline away with his sleeve. 

“I gave you a potion in the tunnels,” Fenris said. It sounded more defensive than he’d expected – before he’d spoken them, the words had been jumbled up on his tongue with an apology. 

“Could be the lyrium, I suppose,” Anders suggested, gesturing toward Fenris’s markings. 

“It never affected Danarius in this way when….” He bit his lip to hold back the words, but Anders had noticed, his head cocked to one side, eyes bright with interest in his hollow face. Fenris looked away, staring at a gnarled nub of Deathroot as if fascinated by its leathery leaves. “You’re unwell, so we should get you off your feet as soon as possible,” he murmured and swallowed down a sigh of relief when Anders started limping toward his clinic, using his staff as a walking stick, instead of asking any questions. 

****************

The mansion seemed almost like a home with a fire flickering on the hearth, cats curled contentedly before it, and another person with him in the room where he slept. Homelike but strange, not least because Fenris had never had a home. He’d only had spaces that he occupied. The fire drove off the damp, muffled the smells of the moldering corpses and rotting wood, and illuminated the dark corners where the memories of Danarius’s shade pets lurked – the room was finally more than merely inhabitable. 

Fenris had shoved the bed closer to the fireplace so Anders could lie down by the fire, and the warmth from the flames had brought some color back into his cheeks, though the tiny sips of wine he had been taking since Fenris had brought up a few bottles from the cellar were no doubt helping as well. Justice clearly wasn’t relenting when it came to drunkenness, though. If anything, the mage looked more melancholy than before, absentmindedly scratching the ears of the cats when they butted their heads against his fingers, but not cooing and fussing over them the way he had before. Fenris would have welcomed such nonsense if it had meant that Anders would do more than gaze at the fire with blank, empty eyes. 

“I should just leave Kirkwall, really,” Anders said. His voice was soft, meditative, and yet its suddenness made Fenris jerk with surprise, startling a cat from his lap. “I’m not safe for anyone anymore. Justice… he made me turn on children. _Children_! What if he takes over when I’m treating a patient?” He brushed his fingertips over the stain on his coat again, smiling faintly, bitterly, when they came away dark with blood. The wound’s oozing had slowed after he’d applied a poultice, but Fenris had been unable to find any suitable clothing in the mansion that hadn’t been chewed to lace by moths, so Anders was left to wear his soiled tunic and coat. “I can’t always expect you to be there to punch a hole in me.” 

“Would it be different anywhere else?” Fenris asked, glancing over at Anders. He didn’t quite trust the fitful shadows cast by the fire to hide his face, but Anders wasn’t looking at him anyway – he was staring into the fire as if there were ancient runes carved into it. 

Anders shrugged, the shift of the flames making his frown look deeper. “Kirkwall… there’s something in the stones of this place, down to the bedrock even. I don’t know if it’s the suffering of the slaves whose backs it was built on or that of the mages imprisoned in the Circle for centuries, but there is something not right about this city.” He sighed. “I think Justice can sense it, but since it’s a sort of formless, ambient miasma of injustice, he can’t focus and just strikes out at whatever he can. Or makes me strike out.” 

“Seems a rather circuitous way of admitting that you let yourself be possessed by a demon,” Fenris replied. 

“He’s not a….” Anders snapped his mouth shut, and Fenris saw his adam’s apple bob as he swallowed down whatever he was going to say. “He wasn’t a demon. He was my friend. I don’t know what he’s become because of me, though.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“My anger….” Anders began, then paused, inhaling deeply. “I think it has warped him into a spirit of Vengeance rather than Justice.” His voice was soft, pitched low as if only for Fenris’s ears, and yet Fenris got the feeling that Anders was whispering in the hope that Justice somehow wouldn’t hear him. 

“Would that not be a demon?” Fenris asked. “I thought spirits were supposed to be noble.” 

Anders shook his head impatiently. “Not necessarily.” He laughed, the bitter tone Fenris had heard in it before tempered now by sadness, and shook his head again, a slight shake, almost a shiver. “I never thought I was angry before I met Justice. Well, I thought I had gotten past my anger anyway. I’d escaped from the Circle, had a cat, all the wine and women I could want. What was there to be angry about?” He lapsed into silence, appearing very engrossed in watching his fingers flex and relax. 

Finally, Anders spoke again, his voice even softer than before, as if he were talking to himself rather than to Fenris, “By making me care about the plight of other mages, Justice ended up summoning the rage that twisted him into Vengeance. I don’t know which of us is to blame anymore.” 

“Does it matter?” 

“No, I suppose not. It only matters in that I am the one who will physically carry out Vengeance’s will,” Anders said. He wiped his palms on the blanket as if they were dirty. “It would have been those apprentices’ blood on _my_ hands.” 

“But it wasn’t,” Fenris replied, turning on the bench to face Anders, casting a quivering shadow over the foot of the bed, so long that it reached the tips of Anders’s fingers, splayed on the blanket, as if the mage were stroking the shadow’s hair. “How long are you going to flagellate yourself for something you didn’t do?” 

“Of course you wouldn’t understand,” Anders snapped. “You seem to only worry about saving your own hide, literally!” He swung his legs over the side of the bed as if to stand, but Fenris noticed him hesitate, bracing himself as if the room were spinning around him. 

“Yes,” Fenris sneered, “I killed templars and dragged you through the Undercity because I only care about myself.” 

“But what have you done for your fellow slaves? You hate mages because they enslaved you, and yet you leave the slaves you served with to their fate?” He tried to stand again, doubled over, his feet shuffling on the floorboards as he steadied himself, one hand clutching the bedstead. Fenris jumped to his feet and was at the bedside in two long strides, his hands gripping the collar of Anders’s coat so hard, he heard the threads snap. 

“You know nothing of Tevinter, mage. Nothing!” The blue glow of his markings lit Anders’s face from below, making him look even more gaunt, shining on the feverish sweat that still slicked his cheeks, and then they were mirrored in Anders’s eyes as Justice took hold of him, as the swirling flames of the spirit wavered back and forth with the golden-brown irises of the man. 

“Go on, do it!” Anders shouted, his voice weighed down with the echo of Justice, like a cloud heavy and dark with rain. “Finish what you started!” 

“What _I_ started?” Fenris said, letting out an incredulous laugh. Perhaps Anders was referring to what had happened in the tunnels – even though he’d _thanked_ Fenris for doing it – but he wondered if Anders meant the long-ago night in the alley behind the Chantry when, in the gleam of Fenris’s activated markings, Anders had pressed his lips, his weight, against Fenris as if he were a conduit to the Fade that the mage could fall through. Or was he talking about the other mage, the friend who had been made Tranquil, who had begged to die and gotten his wish from Fenris while Anders hesitated? Could _that_ have been Anders’s first step toward seeking death? For a moment, Fenris felt as if he’d phased his fist into his own gut and squeezed, bile churning upward into his throat, a tightness in his chest that was too confusingly close to jealousy for his liking. 

Hands shaking with the effort, he shoved the mage back down onto the bed and let his markings go out. The old bedstead creaked in protest under Anders’s weight, but he seemed too exhausted to try standing again, especially since Justice had fled along with the light in Fenris’s markings. 

“ _Vishante kaffas_!” he swore, glaring down at Anders, each quirk of the mage’s eyebrows or disgusted wrinkle of his long nose adding to his anger. Anders seethed, fairly panting with rage – Fenris expected blue to shine through his skin at any moment, like embers glittering in a piece of live coal – and yet a challenging look still lingered in his eyes, daring Fenris to give in to his own rage, to prove that it wasn’t just mages, or Anders himself, who couldn’t control themselves. “Do you want to die, mage?” 

Anders slumped against the pillows as if he couldn’t hold himself upright anymore. “I don’t know,” he murmured, his voice so soft that Fenris had to lean toward him to hear it over the sound of his own heavy breath. “I don’t know if I can.” 

Fenris snorted. “A mage who doesn’t just want to be a magister but a god. Wonderful.” 

As deflated as Anders appeared, he still managed a scathing glare, the firelight turning his eyes a leonine gold as they cut upward at Fenris’s face. “It’s Justice,” he said. His hand rose and rested on his chest, fingers absently running back and forth over his heart. He seemed unaware that he was doing it. “I don’t think he’ll allow it. Spirits and, yes, demons come out to protect their hosts. And things have… happened. Things that should have killed me. A templar once stabbed me in the heart, and I felt nothing but anger.” He stared into the flames, hand still rubbing the worn cloth over his heart. “Nothing but anger and the ecstasy of vengeance.” 

Despite the fire crackling at his back, Fenris shivered. He wasn’t frightened of the mage – even if Anders _was_ immortal, he could definitely be incapacitated – it was the inflectionless emptiness of his voice that chilled him, even as he spoke of ecstasy, as if the Anders sitting in his bed had been summoned by a necromancer, was a dead man with the grave still clinging to him. He sounded _Tranquil_. Fenris’s knees trembled, and he sat down hard on the bed before they gave out. He was in Anders’s field of vision, between him and the flames, and yet the mage didn’t seem to see him at all. 

“Did you ever think about killing yourself, Fenris?” Still that dead, empty voice. 

“I did not,” Fenris replied. Perhaps his answer would have been different if he had been able to remember what he’d lost, had had something better to compare to the pain that dominated his memory. 

“Not even to get out of slavery? To escape Danarius? Don’t tell me you never thought about it.” Some of the life had come back into Anders’s voice – it seemed that arguing, or the potential for an argument, always had that effect on him – and he leaned toward Fenris, firelight catching on the steep planes of his cheekbones, caressing them like loving fingers. 

“To kill oneself is a sin in the eyes of the Maker,” Fenris responded with an uncomfortable shrug, the words coming by rote. Some of the slaves he had known had clung to religion as a promise to be granted after death, when they would enjoy an eternity of freedom by the Maker’s side that they’d been denied in their mortal life, and Danarius had bowed to the authority of the Black Divine and the Tevinter Chantry, whose teachings would have been alien to anyone in the South. Fenris had absorbed a combination of the two, though sometimes he felt that the Maker was just another master to serve, another master whose displeasure he should fear. 

“You… believe that?” Anders asked, and Fenris gave another twitch of his shoulders, annoyed by the incredulity, liberally shot through with mockery, that he detected in the mage’s voice. He heard without seeing the smirk he knew was curling Anders’s lips. 

The uncertainty in his voice – a product of tiredness, he told himself – annoyed him even more when he replied, “I try to. Some things must be worse than slavery.” 

He permitted himself a quick glance at Anders, knowing that to the mage’s eyes he would be nothing more than a silhouette backlit by the fire, and was surprised to find his face grave, thoughtful as he nodded. 

“Some things are worse than death,” was all the mage said, some of the hollowness returning to his voice, along with a finality that Fenris both envied and feared.


	10. Chapter 10

Fenris never stopped moving – the elf was always transferring his weight from one foot to the other, flicking invisible lint from his shoulders, ducking from the swooping flies that swarmed all over Darktown. A week had passed after they had massacred the templars in the subterranean tunnels, and Fenris had finally agreed that Anders could go back to the clinic during the day, as long as he kept watch outside. The elf’s presence may have deterred a few of the more skittish refugees, but throughout the long days of casting healing spells, setting broken bones, and applying poultices, Anders often glanced up and could see Fenris in brief glimpses outside the clinic’s front door, always moving in what started to seem less like a series of nervous tics and more like an intricate choreographed dance to music Anders couldn’t hear. The fidgeting wasn't bird-like, to Anders’s eyes, because while alert, it lacked the air of impending flight. Fenris’s grooming – the fussy shoulder-brushing, the worrying at his hair – was almost catlike, but that of a nervous cat, a cat among dogs, muscles tensed to fight rather than flee.

He’d also taken to leaving what Anders could only describe as gifts around the clinic, like a cat leaving dead voles on its master’s pillow. If Anders asked one of the Fereldan women who assisted him for a certain herb or more bandages only to be told that they had run out, the next morning the item would be there waiting for him in the clinic when he opened the door. The women all claimed innocence, and after they started sending significant glances in Fenris’s direction and giggling among themselves, Anders had started to believe them. It had been a strange week. 

Though Anders doubted that any week following being overcome by a spirit of Vengeance and burning a dozen men alive would be considered normal. Not that the strangeness had ended with the deaths of the templars and the return of the apprentices to their imprisonment in the Gallows. If anything, that had been the least strange occurrence – Vengeance, or Justice as he’d been at the time, had made no secret of his intention to kill every last templar in Thedas, so slaughtering them when the opportunity arose wasn’t much of a surprise. Even distantly watching Fenris shoved his gauntleted fist into his abdomen, feeling the pain of it as if in empathy, as if it were happening to someone else, hadn’t come as a great shock. After all, the elf had seemed to be looking for reasons to start plucking out Anders’s internal organs almost from the moment he’d learned Anders was a mage. Waking up on a stone floor with Fenris’s hand cupping his chin, now _that_ had been unexpected. 

He still wasn’t certain if it was the lyrium in Fenris’s tattoos or just the fact his innards had been rearranged by someone wearing clawed steel gauntlets that had left him sweating and disoriented in Fenris’s musty-smelling bed for nearly three days. He’d used lyrium potions before to restore his mana, but ingesting lyrium refined by an experienced potionmaker was a far cry from having Maker-knew-what kind of lyrium embedded in an elf’s skin applied directly to one’s viscera. Brief flashes of lucidity gleamed in his memory from out of the haze of illness, but they felt too bright to look at, and if he was honest, he didn’t want to examine them closer. And yet they had a way of surfacing, like a drowned corpse bobbing back up from the depths. 

“What could be worse than death?” the memory of Fenris’s voice asked, that blend of rasp and rumble that made Anders think of a burning log crumbling into a glittering shower of sparks and ash. He remembered being unable to see Fenris’s face beyond the golden points of light in his eyes and being bewildered by how the elf’s hair seemed to glow a brighter white in the firelight rather than mellowing into gold. 

“You should know that,” Anders had replied, and Fenris had turned away, leaving Anders to stare at his profile, the straight nose, the rounded chin tucked snugly beneath the full lips, the faint glisten of the lyrium in his skin. “Pain with no end. Lack of freedom.” He had looked down at his own hands spread on the blanket like dead, sun-bleached starfish, almost hidden by the shadow Fenris cast. “Being trapped in your own body, seeing out your eyes, while someone else moves you like a puppet. And you’re trying to scream, to move a single muscle, but there’s no escape. Until you look down at the blood on your hands....” 

When he’d looked up again, Fenris had been staring at him, those gold wedges of light fixed in his direction. He wondered if the elf’s face was contorted in the usual sneer it had when Anders spoke about Justice, but perhaps ignorance was better. The illusion – or delusion – of being understood was somehow comforting. 

“Is that what happens when…” Fenris paused, seeming to hesitate over choosing “Justice”, “Vengeance”, or his favorite, “your demon”. 

“Justice,” Anders prompted. It was easier to call him that, left a probably misguided sliver of hope that the friend he knew might return, momentarily relieved his guilt at having corrupted Justice into Vengeance. 

“…takes you over?” Fenris finished. He shifted on the bed so that his back was against the footboard, hip nudging Anders’s foot through the blanket, arms crossed over his chest. The firelight illuminated half of his face, leaving the other half in shadow, gold rippling over the green of his visible eye like sunshine on water. 

Anders nodded, scanning what he could see of Fenris’s face for disgust or contempt. Instead, he thought he saw… understanding? Which had seemed impossible, until Fenris gave a quick, jerking nod. “I have experienced something similar,” Fenris said, his voice hesitant and low as if it were being drawn out of him against his will. The dark brow that Anders could see drew down, and he could picture the angry furrow in the elf’s forehead. “But it was forced on me. I did not willingly…” 

“…become an abomination,” Anders supplied for him, hoping to urge him along. “Yes, I know. What happened?” 

Fenris bowed his head, his expression lost to shadow, though Anders saw the golden fleck of light in his eyes dart down toward the floorboards, and he could guess that that wide-eyed look of uncertainty and diffidence that seemed so out of place on the elf’s face had come over it. “I was on Seheron with Danarius during a Qunari attack – they’ve been warring with the Imperium for control of that island for centuries – and I managed to get him to a ship, but there was no room for a mere slave. I was left behind.” Anders had expected to hear anger in his voice, but it was flat, matter-of-fact, with the faintest trace of sadness, like ink that had been scraped from parchment with a rough stone. “I barely made it out of the city alive.” 

“How did you survive?” Anders asked, wanting to leave the subject of the magister as quickly as possible. “Isn’t Seheron mostly jungle outside of the capital?” 

“There are rebels in the jungles called Fog Warriors. They found me and took me in, nursed me back to health.” He glanced up at Anders, the firelight making shadows pool in the upward curve of his lips as he smirked. “I seem to be fortunate in that regard.” 

“Is that gratitude I hear?” Anders replied, smiling and hoping that the room was dim enough that Fenris couldn’t see his cheeks darken. 

Fenris’s smirk deepened for a moment, but then he looked away again, into the indistinct middle distance this time, as if he were seeing the lush green of the Seheron jungle again, scarves of unnatural white fog tentacling between the trees. “I stayed with them for a time, until Danarius finally came for me.” 

“Did you want to go with him?” Even as he asked the question, Anders was unsure whether he wanted to hear the answer. He found it unsettling that he could still hear slight hints of… awe? worship? _love_? for the magister in Fenris’s voice at times – it reminded him of a kicked dog remaining loyal to its master no matter how many times its ribs felt his boot. 

“I had grown… fond of the rebels in my time with them. They bowed to no master and fought for their freedom, everything that I should have wanted to do. It was beyond my experience.” He lowered his head again, and Anders heard the scrape of metal on metal as Fenris unbuckled his vambraces and gauntlets and dropped them on the blanket. “When Danarius came, they didn’t want to let him take me. He ordered me to kill them. So I did.” The words came out clipped, quick cuts with a sharp blade. They both stared at the tongues of flame licking across the wicked claws of Fenris’s gauntlets, splayed on the blanket like a venomous insect waiting to sting an unwary bare foot. “I killed them all,” Fenris said, his voice dipping lower, strangled deep in his throat. 

Anders waited, knowing that any show of sympathy would be construed as pity and therefore be unwanted. As often as he’d mentally accused Fenris of wallowing in self-pity, he’d quickly realized that pity from an outside source was unwelcome. And he _had_ pitied Fenris, as difficult as the elf had made that. 

“I killed them because it was Danarius’s will, but their blood is on my hands, just as the blood of those your demon would have you kill in pursuit of its noble quest will be on yours. When it was over and I looked down at their bodies, I felt…” Fenris’s face screwed into that pensive yet frustrated expression that made him appear younger to Anders’s eyes, and when he spoke again, he sounded younger too, unsure, almost petulant. “I couldn’t… I ran and never looked back.” 

He turned his face away from Anders as if in shame, as if he had been describing something abhorrent rather than the first honorable act of his life, the first choice he’d made for himself. For a moment, Anders envied him. Anders’s own life was a string of poor choices, one after the other, like mismatched beads on a garish necklace. 

“Well, I can’t exactly run from Justice, can I?” Anders replied. 

He must not have hidden the bitterness in his voice as well as he’d thought, because Fenris shot off the bed and started pacing back and forth in front of the fire, Tevene curses streaming from his lips. When he reached the far end of the fireplace, he turned back and glared at Anders, green eyes hot with anger. “You… _Festis bei umo canavarum_!” he muttered through clenched teeth. 

Anders had forgotten all the conjugations and declensions of Tevene he’d learned here and there at the Fereldan Circle, but he managed to puzzle out a general translation: _You will be the death of me_. Ironic, considering how many times he’d healed Fenris in the brief time they’d known one another, but it probably wasn’t the time to point that out. “Why?” 

Fenris raked his hand through his hair and then stared at it as if surprised to find it bare, flexing his long fingers as if relearning how to use them. “I’ve never spoken to anyone about what happened with the Fog Warriors. I’ve never wanted to. But I thought… I thought it could help you somehow, assuage your misguided guilt, and you! You throw it back in my face!” 

He was approaching the bed again now, and it took some effort for Anders not to shrink back from him a little. The partly healed wound in his abdomen throbbed, and the combination of heat, wine, and blood loss had made him woozy – if he tried to stand again, he’d most likely collapse like a day-old kitten nosing blindly for its mother. 

“I didn’t –” he began, but Fenris brushed his words away with a curt swipe of his hands, intimidating even without the armor. 

“You are so bloody serious about mages and your own supposed oppression, but everything else is a fucking joke to you,” Fenris ranted, wagging his finger at Anders the way the mages at the Circle had when he was an apprentice and had been determined to conjure toads in their bunks rather than concentrate on his studies. 

“I’m sorry!” Anders blurted, wedging the words into the tiny gap of silence Fenris had left. “I didn’t mean to make light of what you were telling me. It’s just that I don’t have the option of escaping from this. Justice is part of me. He might even _be_ me.” 

Fenris shook his head indignantly. “It was not a solution. It was a way to survive.” He was at the far end of the hearth again, his back to Anders, shoulders slouched in spite of his spiky pauldrons. Anders followed the long, sinuous line of the elf’s spine with his eyes, watching it shift as Fenris took a deep breath. He looked away when Fenris turned back toward him. “You accused me of not caring about my fellow slaves.” Anders opened his mouth to protest, but Fenris silenced him with another brusque wave of his hand. “I wouldn’t fight the slavers here in Kirkwall if I didn’t,” he continued. “I know my limits, something that you definitely do not. There is only so much one man can do, so I do that and don’t blame myself for not doing more. Perhaps you could learn from that.” 

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say so much, Fenris,” Anders said, forcing levity that he did not feel into his voice. He felt mired down, like he was slogging through Blackmarsh. “I didn’t know you had it in you.” 

“You fool,” Fenris grated. “I’m trying to help you. And being driven mad for my trouble.” He took up his pacing again, bare feet seeming to barely graze the dry-rotten floorboards. “You are completely selfish, and yet you are selfless. You help others all day long, but you refuse to accept any aid yourself. Why?” 

“Maybe because I’m beyond help,” Anders murmured, watching his fingers trace the pattern on the blanket. 

He heard a low growl, a snarl of pure inarticulate frustration, and glanced up to find Fenris stalking toward him, lit tattoos turning him to an eerie blue wraith as he crossed the floor. Perhaps he should have been casting a defensive spell or at least raising his arms to fend the elf off, but before he could react, Fenris had grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and was mashing his face against Anders’s. Well, mostly his mouth, but Anders could feel the smoothness of Fenris’s cheeks against the rough stubble of his own, the warm smear of saliva across his upper lip. Their noses bumped together, and Fenris seemed content to leave them smashed against one another, so Anders tilted his head a bit to one side and let the tip of Fenris’s nose nudge his cheek instead. He remembered this sense of being smothered, the strange, enthusiastic amateurishness of it from that night months ago when Karl had died, but this lacked the punishing quality that had had. He supposed he should have called it a kiss, but the word hardly applied. 

And yet amid the shock and confusion of it, he could hear the gentle chiming of the lyrium in the tattoos that curved around Fenris’s chin, and he strained upward toward that sweet hum, reaching up to cradle the elf’s face in his cupped hands. Fenris flinched, and Anders thought for a moment that he would pull away, but then he pushed his lips harder against Anders’s. It was clumsy, and Anders could feel his teeth bruising the inside of his own mouth, but the thrill of contact and – more – of being _wanted_ sent a jolt of arousal through him. Fenris was pressing his lips to Anders’s mouth as if Anders were drowning and he was trying to breathe life back into him, and while the sensation itself wasn’t particularly pleasant, the desire behind it was something he’d missed in the languid, impersonal embraces of prostitutes, though the _why_ of that desire was still a mystery to him. Not that it mattered. 

Fenris’s hair, soft as moonlight, tickled his face as Anders tilted his head back, drawing away just enough that his upper lip was barely brushing Fenris’s lower one. He felt Fenris’s breath quiver against his mouth, a flutter like the beat of a frightened heart, and, smiling, he took Fenris’s lower lip between his own and gently sucked it. The elf froze like a startled hare, though Anders could sense the expectation in that tension, the curiosity. Despite likely being denied an education because of his position, Fenris was obviously intelligent – he must have absorbed every bit of knowledge he could just by watching and listening, and he seemed to learn quickly. Anders slipped the tip of his tongue between Fenris’s lips, just enough to lightly trace the seam between them, and after a moment’s hesitation, Fenris parted his lips and shyly curled his tongue against Anders’s. 

As if that hesitant brush had been a spoken invitation, Anders plunged his fingers into Fenris’s hair, threading them through the waves behind his ears and deepened the kiss. Fenris’s knees seemed to give out from under him, and he sank onto the mattress, kneeling in front of Anders. His lips never leaving Fenris’s, Anders rose onto his knees and, untangling one hand from Fenris’s hair, slid it down the elf’s back, nails grazing the line of flesh along his spine bared by his armor. Fenris groaned softly into his mouth, teeth nipping briefly at Anders’s lower lip. He cupped Fenris’s arse, silently thanking the Maker – or should it have been the Creators? – for the elven predilection for tight trousers; he could feel every dip and curve as clearly as if he were touching bare skin. Anders dug his fingers into the firm, rounded muscle and gathered Fenris against him. The front of the elf’s tunic parted, and his erection pushed against Anders’s stomach, thick and warm even through their layers of clothing. His own cock had been at half-mast already, but at that touch, it strained against the confines of his trousers. With a twitch of his hips, he brushed his erection against Fenris’s, hearing himself let out a sound that was part-moan, part-whimper at the contact. 

Fenris jolted away from him, so abruptly that Anders kept leaning toward him as if drawn along on a string connected to Fenris’s lips, and slipped out of Anders’s arms and off the bed. He turned away from Anders, standing even more slouched than usual and crossing his arms at his waist as if to conceal the bulge between his thighs. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have….” 

Anders dropped his hands that had been left cradling the empty space where Fenris’s face had been. “I thought you wanted….” He directed his stare at Fenris’s groin, which made the elf go scarlet and tug at the edges of his tunic to pull it lower. “Is it because I’m a mage?” he asked, ignoring the warning glare Fenris shot his way. “I’m not Danarius, Fenris. I had no intention of doing anything to hurt you,” he said, trying to tamp down the guilt that flared when he remembered that he _had_ hurt Fenris before, whether he’d intended to or not. 

Fenris’s face twisted at the mention of Danarius, lips peeling back from his teeth and the heat of arousal in his eyes sharpening into that of anger. A shade seemed to have been pulled behind them, closing Anders out and trapping Fenris with his own memories, the few he had. 

“That is _not_ what I meant, mage. You are injured. It seems unwise to....” he trailed off, and Anders wasn’t sure if Fenris didn’t know what he wanted next with Anders or what people in general did in such situations. 

“I was a Grey Warden. This,” he gestured toward the island of blood mapped on his coat front, “this is just a scratch to me. Well, more of a puncture, maybe. As you’d know.” Even as he said it, the blood that had gathered in his cock began to dissipate, and the wound started to throb all over again. 

“I should have known your gratitude would be short-lived,” Fenris sneered. He bent toward the bed, and Anders wasn’t sure if he should duck a punch or lean into a kiss, but the elf just scooped up his discarded armor and headed toward the table to collect his sword. “You can stay here. I’ll go… elsewhere.” 

“Don’t be stupid,” Anders said, grabbing the headboard of the bed to pull himself up. “This is your—this is where you’ve been living. I can go back to the clinic.” 

Fenris stopped halfway to the door and glared back at him from under a tousled fringe of pale hair. The lyrium’s hum almost rang in the warm air – he must have been on the point of activating his markings. Justice stirred inside Anders as if cocking an ear to the bell-like song. _That ache_ , Justice murmured, _I remember the ache the lyrium summoned in me._ You _know that ache too_. 

Anders blinked in surprise. Justice had always protested if he’d come too close to anyone else, saying that it was a distraction from their purpose, but he seemed intrigued by Fenris. _Not Fenris_ , Anders told himself. _The lyrium_ in _Fenris_. But what did that make of his interest in Fenris, if it was even interest at all, rather than simple physical attraction or desperation for contact? He’d told Fenris that he and Justice might have been forged into one entity, so was he too reacting only to the lyrium’s sweet call? Smothering a groan of exhaustion and frustration, he buried his face in his hands. When he took them away, Fenris was gone. 

****************

Anders never found out where “elsewhere” was. He had slept for two more days in the dilapidated mansion, waking occasionally to find himself cocooned in sweat-soaked sheets that had the burnt ozone smell of lyrium, staring up at the stars through the rent in the roof. The cats curled up against him a few at a time, as if they were taking the task in shifts, and sometimes, in the midst of feverish dreams, he thought he heard the creak of a door, the pad of bare feet light on the floorboards. 

On the third day, he found he could sit up without the room lurching, and the odor of lyrium had faded and been overwhelmed by the stench of dry rot and moldering bodies. _Then Fenris isn’t here_ , he thought. _Probably hasn’t been back for days_. He peeled the blanket away and glanced down at himself, eyes darting quickly from the faint scar above his heart to the new one in his abdomen, still angry-looking but beginning to pucker as it healed. His shirt and coat were draped over the bench in front of the fireplace as if they’d been thrown there, and he dressed slowly, checking each lace and buckle for damage. He must have torn the clothing off in a fit of fever, and yet there were no new tears or holes, just a few missing feathers. 

The fireplace was cold, the hearth black and greasy with spent ashes. No empty bottles stood on the table; no imprint remained on the cushion of the chair – nothing to indicate that Fenris had returned since the night they’d kissed. _The night that_ he _kissed_ you, Anders thought. _And then you had to bring up his master like the blighted idiot that you are_. He nudged the ashes on the hearth with the toe of his boot, an emptiness expanding in his chest, leaving it as cold as the stones of the fireplace. He knew that emptiness too well – it was one of the reasons why he’d been a willing host to Justice, to never be alone again, to never have that emptiness yawn wide in his chest, taking on the shape of the cell in the dungeon where he’d been held for a year. 

He’d intended to have a companion who could never leave him the way Karl had been taken from him – though he admitted to himself now that Karl had left him long before he’d even been transferred to Kirkwall. He had wanted to be independent, free, self-sufficient in a way that he could see that Fenris – whether he would have believed it or not – was and he still was not. Fenris could go anywhere, and if he had a sword and the strength of his own body, he would survive. But Anders… he was still too weak, too dependent on the notice of others, and Justice had not remedied that. If anything, their intertwining had made it worse – it was too difficult to tell where Justice’s disapproval of any distraction from their cause stopped and Anders’s actual disinterest in someone else began. And so, in spite of another entity muttering in his head, he had been alone again. Until Fenris. 

Before he left the mansion, he wandered through a few rooms and called Fenris’s name in a voice that didn’t carry in the empty rooms as if it knew he didn’t really want to be heard, and the only response he received was a mocking echo and the purrs of the cats who rubbed against his legs in figure-eights until he could barely walk for tripping over them. 

“Well, I’ll definitely miss _you_ ,” he told them, stooping over to scratch them each between the ears. “Unless the elf suddenly discovers locks, perhaps I’ll be able to sneak in for visits.” 

Then he slipped out the door into the quiet stone courtyard, expecting to find Fenris slouching against the wall as he had been the day they’d cleared the mansion of Danarius’s demonic servants, but all he found was the soft clatter of fallen leaves blown by the wind. A purplish stain like a many-rayed sun still marked the spot where Fenris had hurled the bottle of Agreggio at his head. Well, the first bottle of Agreggio. _Get a hold of yourself, man_ , he thought as he headed toward the marketplace and the wide steps cut deep into the cliff on which Hightown perched. _Going all moony over having a bloody bottle thrown at you? It’s a wonder you didn’t propose to every templar who took a switch to your back._

Each step down the staircase toward Darktown jarred the wound in his stomach, but the dizziness had gone, and after the dust and damp of Fenris’s mansion, the salt-and-sewer-tinged breeze coming off the harbor was almost refreshing. When he reached his clinic, the lamp wasn’t burning, and the crowds of Fereldan refugees milling about were thinner than usual, but every greeting he received was accompanied by an expression of obvious relief. He had been away too long, though it hadn’t been by choice. 

A flicker of surprise shot through Lirene’s dark eyes when she looked up from the stoppered bottles of powdered herbs she was arranging and saw Anders walking toward her. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, holding up his hands. “I was injured the night we took the apprentices back to the Gallows. I should have sent word.” – _yes, because Fenris would have been overjoyed to be your messenger boy, wouldn’t he?_ – “It was wrong of me to just disappear; you must have all thought the worst.” 

Lirene frowned. “Your elf informed me that you were indisposed three days ago,” she replied in a hesitant voice, eying him as if she were going to feel his forehead for a fever. “I am glad that you have recovered… apparently.” 

“My elf?” He ran his fingertips along his brow, as if he could massage his thoughts into order through his skull. She must have meant Fenris, but why would he have bothered when he’d all but abandoned Anders in a decaying mansion? “Fenris came here?” 

“Yes. I can’t say his visit was particularly informative, but at least we knew you were alive.” The bottles of herbs clinked together as she shoved them back onto their shelf. “And since you have returned, I must go back and see to my shop.” She gave him a stiff bow of her head and sidled past him in that deliberate way of hers that always made him wonder if she weren’t a noblewoman who had fallen from her gilded Hightown perch straight into Lowtown. 

“Thank you,” he called after her faintly, even as he puzzled over Fenris and his confounding disappearance and just as baffling reappearance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the abrupt chapter ending -- this section ended up being very long, and there was no other good place to split it up. The continuation of this section will be up next week!


	11. Chapter 11

The thoughts buzzed at the back of his head like bees in a kicked hive as he worked through the queue of patients that had formed inside the clinic, applying poultices, handing out salves, casting healing magic. Hours passed, the ache in his back growing as the questions in his head died down, and he became so fully immersed in the work of healing that he hardly noticed the commotion spreading through the clinic like ripples on a pond.

“Mage!” The word sounded like the belly of a wind-taut sail being ripped open by a sword. 

Anders jerked upright and found himself staring into Fenris’s eyes, the spots of light in them pinning him down like brass tacks. The elf was flushed, the tips of his ears red as embrium blossoms pushing up through snow, and when he spoke again, his voice was raw and hoarse, his breath short as if he’d run all the way to Darktown. “Where did you go?” 

Anders grinned, the little crooked grin that had charmed his mentors at the Circle in Ferelden until they’d learned that it usually meant that he was up to some mischief or plotting another botched escape. Standing there, Fenris’s glare all but pummeling him, he felt the ice of Lake Calenhad cracking under his boots all over again, that ominous shift, that inevitable acceptance of retreat. “Since you’ve found me here, seems as though you know where I went.” 

“You know what I meant,” Fenris grumbled, his voice frustration and embarrassment combined, and his shoulders slumped forward as if he were cringing away from a blow. “Why did you leave?” 

_I could ask the same of you_ , Anders thought, though he knew why Fenris had left. “Why would I have stayed?” he asked, and Fenris blinked, flinching infinitesimally. It was probably all the reaction he’d trained himself to have during his years of being a slave, and Anders remembered the litany he’d chanted to himself during the long years at the Circle – never let them see you weep, never let them hear you scream, never let them know what you care about. For all of Fenris’s lectures on survival, Anders had plenty of methods of his own. 

He took a deep breath, knuckling his back and rolling his shoulders to work the aches out of them. “Let me finish with my patients, and then we can discuss this,” he said, and to his relief Fenris, his face impassive again as a sandstone statue’s, ducked into the storage area where Anders slept. 

The weight of Fenris’s presence – and, worse, his _waiting_ presence – pressed down on Anders as the hours passed. He remembered a spell gone wrong, one he’d devised with Karl when they were both apprentices, hoping to use it to make pretty girls want to kiss them – or, in Anders’s case, to make Karl want to kiss _him_. Dark roiling clouds of magic had billowed throughout the abandoned storeroom they’d found, spreading beyond their capability to control it, and in the end, they’d run, shutting the swirling, light-eating magic behind the storeroom door, as if that could somehow pen it in. The anticipation of it bursting free and enveloping the entire Tower had had the same inexorable pressure as the knowledge that he would have to face Fenris, though this time, no indulgent First Enchanter would be there to make excuses for him. 

After he’d extinguished the lantern and bolted the doors, he fought back the urge to do every chore around the clinic that he’d been putting off and forced himself to cross the packed dirt floor toward the storage area. Fenris had had a phrase for it that Anders had heard him use once – turning to face the tiger – and he could easily imagine Fenris waiting for him, all muscles tensed to pounce. 

But when he opened the door, Anders found Fenris sitting cross-legged on the camp bed, sword across his knees. In the dimness, the elf wasn’t much more than a shadow embroidered with palely gleaming vines of lyrium, his white hair shining like a cool beacon. With a wave of his hand, Anders lit the lamp and settled onto an empty crate facing Fenris, his back pressed against the wall behind him. 

“So,” Fenris said, his voice like the first cracking of thick winter ice at the beginning of a thaw, “why did you leave?” 

“You made it clear you didn’t want to be in the same building with me, much less the same room,” Anders replied. “You were the one who stormed out, not me.” Which conveniently skirted the fact that Anders couldn’t have crawled out of that room, much less stormed, but he hadn’t wanted to either. 

“I did not…” Fenris began slowly, confusion lowering his voice. He tilted his head to one side, and in the warm, weak glow of the lamp, Anders saw his eyebrows pinch together. “I _walked_ out of the room, yes, but you were asleep, how could you…?” 

“Has all that lyrium rotted your brain the way the dust does to templars?” Anders asked. “You… we… there was… a kiss,” he said, cheeks burning as he stumbled over his words. Sweat pricked along his hairline, and he brushed it away with a quick swipe of his fingers. Why was he coming over all bashful? Everyone had kissed everyone at the Circle in Ferelden, and with his inability to say “no” and desire to please, he had been an enthusiastic part of that “everyone”. “But then, shockingly, we had a disagreement, and you abandoned me to the tender mercies of half a dozen cats who have developed a taste for human flesh. Though they did a fine job of nursing me back to health, I have to say.” 

“The _cats_ nursed you back to health?” Fenris exclaimed, his eyes widening until Anders could see a thin ring of white around the large elven irises. Fenris gave his head a disbelieving shake. “So I suppose me spoon-feeding you and keeping wet cloths on your forehead and tipping potions down your throat had no effect at all?” 

“But…” Anders trailed off, trying to sift through his fever-bleached memories to grasp some bright remnant of anything Fenris had described, the cool nudge of a spoon on his lips, the gentle swabbing of his forehead, though if Fenris’s nursing skills were like his kissing skills, Anders doubted any of it had been _that_ gentle. “I don’t remember any of that,” he mumbled, worry twisting his stomach. What if it hadn’t been the fever that had scoured his memories? What if it had been Justice? He’d had tiny eye-blinks of lost time when Justice took him over, but never anything so prolonged or so complete. “But we _did_ argue, didn’t we?” 

Fenris sniffed. “When do we not? But we were not when—” He turned his head aside and coughed into his fist, that polite, embarrassed stalling tactic he often used. “—when you fell asleep in the middle of trying to choke me with your tongue.” The smirk in Fenris’s voice was like dry, rich red wine, even though the smirk on his lips was nothing more than the tiniest pleating up of one corner of them. 

So _some_ of it had been real. But the join between reality and the scene that Anders had imagined was so seamless as to be nonexistent. “Look, it’s not that I think you’re lying. It’s just that I don’t remember the falling asleep or you taking care of me or any of that. I remember you leaving and me waking up in an empty mansion for days at a time.” He grinned at Fenris, quirking one eyebrow upward. “I do remember the kissing, though I wouldn’t say no to a reminder.” 

If it hadn’t been directed at him, Anders would have laughed at the rapid succession of expressions that scudded over the elf’s face, from shock to fear to disgust. He thought he even detected a hint of interest before Fenris’s eyes narrowed and blotted it out. 

“That will not be happening, mage,” he said, his gauntlets cutting through the air as if he could sweep away the idea with a flick of his hands. 

Anders twitched one shoulder up in what he hoped was a shrug of disinterest so complete that he couldn’t be bothered to raise the other. In the trembling lamplight, smugness seemed to settle on Fenris’s face like a fine layer of dust. “And you’ve no reason to look so self-satisfied. It’s been so long that I’d even ask Knight-Commander Meredith herself for a second kiss.” There, that deflated the puffed-up elf a bit. “Besides, you were the one who kissed me first.” The red that bloomed instantly in Fenris’s cheeks told Anders that that was one detail he _hadn’t_ misremembered. “I suppose it was either that or kill me,” he said, trying to offer Fenris an escape, but instead the elf’s blush deepened to almost a plum. 

“Yes,” Fenris muttered, staring down at the sword across his knees as if he were rethinking his choice. 

After a few beats of silence, Anders said, “I do thank you for looking after me, even if I’m just taking your word for it that you did. Something that outlandish would have to be the truth, wouldn’t it? If only because no one would believe it as a lie.” 

Fenris’s eyes flashed up to meet his, and Anders felt the little grin he’d been maintaining melt off his face. He tried to hide his flinch by hopping off the crate he’d been sitting on. “Now, since you’ve satisfied your curiosity about my whereabouts, I would like to go to sleep,” he said, reaching to unfasten his coat. “And you’re sitting on my bed,” he prompted when Fenris made no move to get up. 

“I have done more for you, _mage_ – and the Maker knows why! –” Fenris began, his voice a snarl. He raised one hand and began ticking points off on his lyrium-limned fingers. “I gave your friend a merciful death when you could not.” One whisper of steel against steel as he lowered his index finger. “I allowed you to use my markings to cast your blighted magic when you were too fatigued to continue.” Another finger curled toward his tattooed palm. “I rescued you from thugs looking to turn you over to the templars. I gave you a potion for your wounds. I agreed to serve as your bodyguard on a foolhardy mission.” Fenris’s other two fingers and his thumb folded into his fist, and he raised his other hand. His voice had risen as each finger had gone down, and when he spoke again, he was shouting. “I kept you from killing innocent children when your _spirit_ bid you do it. I let you sleep in my bed. I bought you medicine. I fed you. I sat you on the bloody privy.” Chest heaving, the elf stared down at his two clenched fists. “And for what? You are everything I abhor.” 

“Am I?” Anders shouted back. Echoes of the argument he’d dreamt rang through his head, the specter of Danarius he’d foolishly evoked, the mask of rage that had covered Fenris’s face at the sound of that name. _Well, at least you won’t be sacrificing any kisses by bringing him up this time_ , he thought. “I am a mage, but I am not Danarius.” Fenris made a noise like the hiss of a kettle about to boil, visibly recoiling as if the magister had been summoned to the room like a demon being called from the Fade. Anders took a step toward him, reaching out a hand – a hand that soon faltered and fell back to his side when he took in how the elf seemed to crumple in on himself, his shoulders so hunched that the spikes of his pauldrons almost brushed his ears. 

“I have no desire to hurt you. Why would I? If anything, I want to help you, if you’ll let me.” He edged another step closer, and the ghostly pale glow of Fenris’s markings lit the tiny room, drowning out the lamp’s flame with their cool light. Fenris’s arm shot out, palm – mapped with narrow, intricate canals of lyrium – up as if to fend Anders off. 

Anders froze, out of respect for Fenris’s wishes but also because Justice – or, with anger roiling through him, Vengeance – had reared up inside him, outraged by the injustice of being judged guilty by the tenuous association of having also been born a mage. He took a few deep breaths, and when he spoke again, his voice, though soft, trembled with the strain. “You have made far better use of your freedom so far than I did.” He laughed, a weak, faltering blend of wistfulness and bitterness. “Until I met Justice, I passed my days of freedom in whorehouses, dreaming of stealing a ship and becoming a pirate.” 

Such an admission would usually have elicited a snort of derision from the elf, but now Fenris remained silent, though his blazing, upraised palm wavered, leaving a faint trail across Anders’s vision. 

“I’m not asking you to trust me completely,” he continued, watching the rivalling light of the lamp and the lyrium slip and slide over Fenris’s white hair. He remembered the insubstantial silkiness of it under his fingertips and wondered if that had just been an invention of his mind too. “That would be an absurd request no matter who I was. All I ask is that you judge me as an individual, not as a mage.” 

“What does it matter if I trust you or not?” Fenris asked, his voice so low and raw that it was nearly a croak; Anders remembered the choruses of bullfrogs in the rushes around Kinloch Hold that had sung to him in counterpoint each night when he was locked alone in the tower, and wrapped his arms around himself, trying to ignore the prickling of the scars on his back. 

“Kirkwall’s the type of city where it helps to have someone to watch your back. You know, so the City Guard doesn’t dump your half-dead body in Lowtown because they can’t be bothered to go all the way to the docks to drop you in the harbor,” he replied. Of course, the real reason – or one of them, which he could never reveal to Fenris – was that in the times when he knew he was dreaming, he’d been aching for Fenris, lyrium leaching from his pores into the bedsheets. He cleared his throat, glad that neither the lamplight nor the shine of Fenris’s markings reached the dark corner where he was standing, the shadows cloaking his blushing cheeks. “Trust me until I give you a reason not to. That’s fair, isn’t it?” 

“You conveniently forget that the first reason not to trust you might end in my death, mage,” Fenris said. He’d lowered his hand, but his head remained bowed, eyes hidden behind dark lashes until Anders could only make out pinpoints of golden light beneath them. 

“Oh, _that_ ,” Anders said, waving his hand dismissively. “The same is true of everyone, when you get right down to it. We’re all trusting each other not to kill one another to some extent. Of course, Kirkwall makes it difficult sometimes, but… I mean, really, what’s keeping you from hacking me in half with your sword right now? Or ripping my heart out?” 

Fenris gave one of his nervous coughs, this one tinged with embarrassment. So the idea _had_ occurred to him. He’d certainly threatened often enough. 

“That could be the first reason you give me not to trust you, but I’d still be dead. If someone has the will to hurt another, they’ll do it, whether they’re a mage or not.” Fenris didn’t respond beyond the faint click of his gauntlets tapping on the blade of his sword, but his silence had taken on a listening quality so intent he seemed to nearly vibrate with it. “I will tell you truthfully that I have never had the will to hurt you,” Anders said, his throat clamping shut so hard that the last word came out thin as a thread of spider’s silk. 

The golden wedges of light in Fenris’s eyes rose like fireflies as he looked up at Anders, and before Anders could move or speak, the elf put aside his sword, unraveled himself from his position on the camp bed, and stood, smooth as silk ribbon. Anders managed a stumbling step backward, but the wall was behind him, cutting off any possible retreat. Still, his head rebounded off the splintering wood as he tried to back away from Fenris’s steel-girded hands. His breath quivered as the cold, sharp points of the gauntlets combed through his hair, just skimming his scalp. Hadn’t he _just_ been doubting whether Fenris could be gentle? One of Fenris’s hands settled around the nape of Anders’s neck, curving around it, and yet that light touch held him in place more easily than any white-knuckled grasp could have. 

“I don’t remember what it’s like,” Fenris mumbled, looking up at Anders with wide, imploring eyes, as if begging to be understood, and Anders was put in mind of a wounded animal, trying to communicate its pain with a look in the absence of a shared language. He _wanted_ to understand, wanted to know what Fenris had forgotten or had perhaps never known, but asking Fenris anything was a tricky business, like navigating the caves that riddled Sundermount without a torch, never knowing when you’d stumble into a nest of spiders or fall down an abandoned mining pit. 

The beginnings of questions formed in his mind but were dispelled like chokedamp by the morning sun as Fenris brushed his cheek against Anders’s chin, his eyelashes tickling the corner of Anders’s lips, as hesitant and yet insistent as a kitten butting its head against its owner’s hand, the same combination of wanting the touch but fearing what might be given in its place. Anders knew the feeling well. 

He leaned into Fenris’s touch, pursing his lips against the satiny skin of the elf’s eyelids, the downy brush of his eyebrows, but the groan that had been wrung from Fenris by the graze of magic against his lyrium tattoos made Anders hold back now, letting the elf guide the contact. Fenris hesitated with every breath, seeming overwhelmed by choice, by being able to choose, but finally he pressed his lips against Anders’s, sighing as he did, Anders tasting his warm breath as it tumbled over his lips. 

All the smothering force of his other kisses was gone – the awkwardness was still there, the struggle to find the right angle so their noses weren’t crushed against one another, but now the yearning in it was undiluted by anger, desperation, frustration. He could feel Fenris trembling like a plucked lute string, and he settled his fingertips on Fenris’s shoulder blades, tracing the outline of them before stroking between them with just enough pressure to be felt through the leather armor. Fenris bit down on his lower lip, not hard, the warning bite of an overstimulated cat, and Anders let his hands fall to Fenris’s hips, resting on his belt. He hooked his fingers through the buckle and pulled Fenris closer, an inch at a time, each tug a gamble to see how close he could draw Fenris to him before he noticed. 

_He tastes like the Fade_ , Justice muttered, and Anders’s eyes bolted open. He was accustomed to sharing a body with the spirit, and he knew that Justice used his eyes and ears, but he’d never commented on anything like this before, beyond remarking that romance – even just sex, though the spirit didn’t seem to know the difference, which Anders assumed was partly his fault – was a distraction from their greater purpose. 

_He tastes like elf mouth_ , Anders replied, which seemed to confuse or disgust Justice enough to shut him up. Before he could close his eyes again, the better to focus on the feeling of Fenris’s tongue curling against his own, he glanced down and found Fenris’s eyes were open too and were fixed on him. For a moment, all he could see was the green of them, the green of growing things, the slopes of Sundermount in the summer, the rain-wet pines at Vigil’s Keep. Nothing grew in Darktown except malformed, poisonous weeds and mold – there were no beginnings there, only ends, and Anders briefly tasted lyrium on his tongue and beyond it the Fade, just as Justice had said. 

But then he noticed that Fenris was watching him, wide eyes weighing, gauging, seeking any hint of displeasure. _It’s his habit_ , Anders thought. _It’s not because he wants to please_ me. _He just wants to please_. With the care he usually saved for his most gravely injured patients, Anders cupped his hands around Fenris’s face, as if he were trying to shield a dying candle flame from a draft, eased his mouth from Fenris’s, and gently kissed his eyelids until they closed beneath his lips, soft, padding kisses. A feather from Anders’s pauldrons was stuck to Fenris’s cheek, curling and uncurling in the breeze created by their mingled, panting breath, and Anders fanned his thumbs back and forth over Fenris’s cheeks to brush it away. 

Fenris made a sound low in his throat, half-frustrated growl, half-pleased trill, and jerked his head out of Anders’s hands. Anders stifled a sigh. Much like questioning Fenris, it seemed that kissing him was a much-booby-trapped endeavor in which gentleness was as unwelcome as aggression, though taking the middle road hadn’t gotten him anywhere either. How to touch someone without touching them? He prepared himself for Fenris to step back, for the heat of his body to leave Anders’s, for the lyrium’s call to thin to a murmur along with Fenris’s heartbeat. 

But then the hand on the nape of Anders’s neck tangled into his hair and tightened, tugging his head back, throat offered up like a sacrifice. Fenris plunged toward him, their bodies meeting as a swimmer merges with his own reflection when diving into clear water, and he pressed a chain of clumsy, damp kisses up along the length of Anders’s neck. He lingered at the spot where Anders’s pulse hammered, sucking at the skin until Anders had to choke back a moan, so accustomed to having to keep silent so the mentors and templars wouldn’t hear, lessons learned in long, frustrating years at the Circle. Anders thought he felt Fenris’s lips curving against his throat, and then Fenris was flicking his tongue over the spot he’d been sucking, as if to soothe away a hurt. Maker, but the elf learned quickly. 

“Andraste’s tufted treasure, Fenris,” he muttered, digging his fingernails into the rotting wood at his back, trying to keep himself from grabbing Fenris and throwing him onto the camp bed, armor and lyrium markings be damned. “I want… I wish…” 

But he gulped down those words before he could finish them, not wanting to remind Fenris of being used by those who cared only for their own desires. Fenris had never told him in so many words, but the constant, timid search for approval had said enough. Still, his body arched toward Fenris, back curving away from the wall behind him. “What do _you_ want, Fenris?” he managed to gasp. 

“Mmm?” was Fenris’s only reply, a low, husky rumble, hummed against Anders’s throat. He loosened his hand from Anders’s hair and slid it down his back, the talons of his finger guards scraping along his spine, and grabbed a hold of Anders’s arse, squeezing the muscle so hard that only the threadbare barrier of his coat and trousers kept him from drawing blood. 

The elf had snaked his other hand between them, and Anders could hear the metallic _click_ of buckles being undone, the slither of leather straps being loosened. What he thought – but couldn’t glance down to see, because Fenris was still enthusiastically sucking on the skin just beneath the corner of his jaw – was Fenris’s belt flopped onto his boots, and then all at once he felt the two sharp points of Fenris’s hipbones and the thick, heavy length of his cock pressed against his own. His head spun as if he’d downed a whole bottle of Agreggio and then smashed it across his own skull. 

If Fenris had appeared overwhelmed by too much choice, Anders felt overwhelmed by too much restriction. It was not a complaint but a concern – he hadn’t been lying when he’d said he didn’t want to hurt Fenris, so he balled his hands into fists at his sides to keep them from touching whatever part of Fenris they could reach. At the Ferelden Circle, the whole thing had been easier out of necessity, a nod of consent and then up with the robes and in before the templar on duty noticed. In the whorehouses he’d stayed in, it had been even more straightforward – whores let you know what they would and wouldn’t do upfront. With Fenris, it all had the potential to be as prickly as his pauldrons _and_ end up with Anders’s heart beating its last in Fenris’s fist. He doubted even Justice could have fixed that. 

“What can I _do_ , Fenris?” he asked, hearing a whine in his voice and hating it. He’d never handled delayed gratification well – Justice had tempered it a little, and living as an apostate made gratification of any kind rare – but he felt like his old self, his former self, a bundle of wanting, coveting, grasping. He lowered his head and looked down at Fenris, whose face was still buried against Anders’s neck. Or, rather, he looked down at Fenris’s hair, fine and white as thistledown, curling against his dark cheeks and forehead, translucent gray where sweat had soaked it. His markings seemed to gather what scant light there was in the little storeroom, making him radiate a faint silvery halo like starlight on a moonless night. He didn’t seem to have heard Anders’s question or was choosing to ignore it. 

“It’s not that my neck and I don’t appreciate the attention—” Anders began, but the words were choked off in an embarrassing squeak as Fenris rolled his hips against him, sliding his erection along Anders’s. “ _Maker_ ,” he groaned, his breath stirring Fenris’s hair. 

Hand shaking, he threaded his fingers into the pale waves at the back of the elf’s neck, carefully, letting him get used to his grasp before tightening it. Finally, he tilted Fenris’s face up to his and kissed him, smiling around the insistent lapping of Fenris’s tongue against his own. He thrust his hips up to meet Fenris’s, and they moaned into each other’s mouths at the friction, neither willing to break the kiss. 

Anders slipped his other hand down the front of Fenris’s breastplate – which was digging into his sternum hard enough to leave a bruise, though he barely felt it over the building tightness in his groin – and tried to unlace the elf’s trousers. He wasn’t even sure how they were still containing Fenris at that point; it must have been terribly uncomfortable, and yet Fenris batted his hand away with a backward swipe of his gauntlet. 

Well, dry-humping, though not ideal, was nothing new to Anders, and it was _something_ after years of nothing, so he fell into a rhythm with the buck of Fenris’s hips, each thrust sending jolts of ecstasy through him, turning his knees to some kind of quivering aspic that would be served at an Orlesian ball. The still-tender wound in his abdomen complained; two clenched knots throbbed in him – pleasure and pain, the pleasure-seeker he’d once been and the tortured, duty-bound creature Justice had made him, two poles with an ever-widening breach between them that might end up tearing him apart. Of course, none of that seemed to matter much at the moment as long as Fenris’s hips worked against his, pushing him ever closer to a momentary oblivion that even Justice couldn’t ruin. 

Then Fenris tore his lips away from Anders’s, hid his face in the feathers on Anders’s pauldron, and shuddered against him. Anders bit back a sigh, smoothing his face to hide any disappointment that might be scrawled across it, and draped his arm loosely around Fenris’s back as the elf’s thrusts shallowed and slowed. His own erection still pushed urgently against the front of his trousers, but he tried to turn his hips so that Fenris wouldn’t feel the pressure of it. He hadn’t been careful enough, though, because Fenris raised his head and Anders found himself looking down into his wide, sheepish, almost frightened eyes, the warm, satisfied glaze of his orgasm already starting to clear from them. 

“Did you…?” Fenris began, his voice unsure, so different from the deep, grating grumble Anders was used to. 

“It’s fine. I can deal with it,” Anders blurted, glad of the darkness that hid his flush of embarrassment as he thought of all the nights he’d done just that after remembering Fenris moaning in the alley in Lowtown with his head thrown back and his lips parted. 

With quick, practiced fingers, Fenris unbuckled his vambrace and gauntlet, added them to the pile at their feet, and plunged his hand down the front of Anders’s trousers. Anders gasped as if someone had slapped a hunk of ice against the back of his neck, rising up on tiptoes as if trying to climb up the wall behind him, the skin of his stomach going taut as a drum as it curved away from Fenris’s hand. The trail of hair running from his navel stood on end from the mere proximity of the lyrium branded into Fenris’s palm, and when that palm circled over the head of his cock, slicking itself with his pre-come, the lyrium seemed to hum right through his skin and it took all his concentration – and some few thoughts of Knight-Commander Meredith plucking her errant chin whiskers – to keep himself from coming right then. 

Though this wasn’t going to be anything lingering or languid – nothing that could be called a caress. Fenris wrapped his fingers around Anders’s cock and stroked him with quick, tidy tugs, _efficient_ , no wasted energy or motion. Anders could imagine Fenris bringing himself off in this way, and that image – and the barest flick of Fenris’s thumb along the slit of his cock – had him almost doubling over, pushing his forehead against the cool metal of Fenris’s breastplate as he came into his hand. 

“Maker’s arse,” he mumbled, cheek still flattened against the elf’s armor. Fenris didn’t shrug him off, to his surprise, but stood there with his hand still shoved down Anders’s trousers, scuffing his feet on the dirt floor as he shifted his weight from foot to foot. With effort, Anders straightened and fished his handkerchief out from under his coat, carefully wiping away the sweaty smear he’d left on Fenris’s breastplate before handing the stained scrap of cloth to Fenris so he could clean the spunk off his hand. 

They weren’t looking at each other, Anders noticed, both busying themselves – or pretending to busy themselves – with straightening their clothing, as if _that_ mattered, re-lacing trousers, smoothing down wayward feathers. Fenris darted a glance his way, and Anders stooped down to gather up Fenris’s belt and gauntlet, ducking under his look as if it had been an arrow. 

He paused there in a crouch, Fenris still close enough that his vision was full of slimly muscled, leather-clad thighs – he could _smell_ Fenris, the come that must have been cooling uncomfortably in those tight trousers, the faint odor of dandelion stems crushed in a warm hand. The urge to nudge his face between those thighs, to feel Fenris harden again against his cheek was so overwhelming that he was almost glad when Justice piped up again about the smell of the lyrium. He quickly snatched up Fenris’s belt and gauntlet and stood up, hoping that Fenris put any redness in his cheeks down to his waning arousal. Well, it was _mostly_ waning but seemed all too eager to be fanned back into a bonfire in spite of his exhaustion and the still-throbbing wound in his stomach. 

Fenris took the proffered armor and turned his back on Anders to strap it back on, as if he were doing something terribly intimate, like lacing up his trousers… though Anders hadn’t bothered to turn away to do that, figuring it was well past the time for such modesty when you’d just coated someone’s fingers with your spunk. 

“Sorry,” Anders said, apologizing as a reflex. “I guess it’s always a bit awkward the first time with someone.” He tried to laugh, a casual shrug of a laugh, but it came out high and almost hysterical, and he clamped his lips together to discourage any follow-up to it. Fenris glanced at him over his shoulder, one dark eyebrow quirked so high it disappeared under the hair falling over his forehead, and Anders cringed, expecting a flatly spoken “the only time” amendment to his statement. 

But instead Fenris – still flat as a lake on a windless day – said, “I wouldn’t know,” and went back to buckling his belt around his hips. 

“You mean you never…?” Anders asked, trailing off and resisting the temptation to make any number of suggestive gestures. 

“Not that I remember,” Fenris replied, steel finger-guards clicking against his buckle as he continued to fidget with it. His voice was as close as Anders had ever heard it come to sounding absent – maybe that was Fenris’s version of the casual tone Anders himself had been going for and missed. Then he looked up, fixing a hard, strangely challenging stare on Anders. “Not by choice.” 

“I… I had no idea,” Anders stuttered, which was a lie, he realized. Fenris had certainly never confided in him, but Anders had been around the victims of less-than-pious templars long enough to recognize the signs, the vigilant tension that repelled touch, the discomfort with unexpected contact. “I mean, you never said…” _Why_ would _he?_ “I mean, I’m sor—” 

“It is done,” Fenris said, brittle and sharp as obsidian. “It is done, but you did not do it.” He bowed his head again, leaving Anders to follow the long curve of his neck with his eyes unobserved. _Like a swan’s_ , he thought and then gulped back a hiccup of laughter at the idea, so foolishly sentimental, more like the treacle in those terrible _Swords & Shields_ novels Lirene sometimes prattled on about. Then he remembered the swans at Lake Calenhad, so prickly and vicious, chasing the apprentices along the banks and hissing if they came close to their nests, and the comparison didn’t seem quite so silly anymore. 

He jerked his eyes away when Fenris began to speak again, in a soft, distant voice, “Slaves own nothing, of course. Not even their own bodies. _Especially_ not their bodies. They might pick up trinkets, scraps that they keep to give themselves the illusion of having something that is just theirs.” Anders noted his use of “they” – did Fenris already feel that much distance from his former life, or was he trying to imply that he had never indulged in such foolishness? – and was tempted to ask what Fenris had collected and kept hidden from his master’s eyes. He could have answered a similar question, he realized, remembering the tiny troves of useless items he’d accumulated during his year in solitary confinement: pips from the half-rotten apples the templars occasionally threw him, the translucent crescents that Mr. Wiggums sloughed off his claws, feathers that drifted in through the arrow-slit windows on the few drafts that reached them. His hands trembled as he smoothed them down the front of his coat to keep himself from reaching out toward Fenris. 

Not that Fenris would have noticed, unless Anders had actually made contact – he seemed to be enveloped in a haze of memories, staring into the distance as if he had centuries to look back through rather than a decade at most. His voice was slow, lulling, meditative, but bitter, like a sleeping draught laced with poison. “Your body is the only thing of any value you have, and so they make sure you remember that it does not belong to you.” His tattoos filled with light as he spoke, though Fenris didn’t appear to notice. 

Justice stirred inside Anders’s head, and now Anders’s own anger gratefully rushed to meet the spirit’s – Justice’s righteous anger at, well, the injustice of slavery fusing to Anders’s rage for himself and for Fenris, for young bodies taken and used, for lives stunted before they could even properly begin, and becoming Vengeance. The odor of burnt sulfur crackled in the air, and Anders saw threads of black smoke spiraling off his own arms. 

“Vengeance,” he said, fighting hard to keep the roar of Justice out of his voice, tired of having the spirit’s emotions – if that was even what they were – always consuming his own. Sometimes they were the same, just amplified, but too often Anders felt separate from them, left out, as if he’d come up with an idea only to have someone else take it, expand upon it, and see it through to completion. “You won’t be able to truly live until you have had revenge on them.” 

Ages seemed to pass before Fenris raised his eyes to meet Anders’s, the gleam of his tattoos cutting the green of them into facets. “No, I won’t.” 

For a moment, Anders felt Justice waver, as if the spirit had weighed Fenris’s plight on some invisible balance and found it wanting. What were two slave-owning magisters set against the entire templar order? What was one slave’s life worth weighed against that of every Circle mage in Thedas? _You bloody hypocrite_ , Anders thought, though he wasn’t sure if it was directed at himself or Justice or whatever they had become together. “Then we’ll just have to kill them.” 

****************

The next day, the gifts had started appearing around the clinic. Perhaps it was just optimism – a rarity since his agreement with Justice and his arrival in Kirkwall – that made him think Fenris was the responsible party. Lirene had taken care of the clinic while he’d been ill – perhaps she was just refilling stores she had noticed were empty. None of the mysteriously appearing items had been _gifts_ exactly, in that they were impersonal, intended for the clinic and the greater good of the Fereldan refugees, rather than anything specifically for Anders. 

Fenris had never seemed particularly interested in the greater good of anyone, though perhaps he was trying to accept Kirkwall as his home. It didn’t seem plausible even to Anders himself, and his self-centeredness – which had somehow weathered the onslaught of selflessness brought on by his friendship with Justice – kept whispering that the potion ingredients and herbs that appeared as if conjured by one of the mages that Fenris so loathed were intended to please _him_. Though why Fenris would feel the need to ingratiate himself to Anders was beyond him. Yes, Anders had taken the apprentices off Fenris’s hands, but Fenris had ended up having to prevent Anders, or Justice, from killing most of them. Anders should have been sending the elf Agreggio Pavali by the case as thanks for that. 

But it wasn’t _just_ Anders’s self-centeredness that made him think his mysterious donor was Fenris. There was also the fact that Fenris had at first resisted the idea of Anders staying in Darktown at all, pointing out that the templars were still a threat, but when were they not? All mages in Kirkwall were equally guilty in the eyes of Knight-Commander Meredith. But letting Fenris guard the clinic during the day had been his terms for not dragging Anders back to Hightown, and it seemed a small concession if it meant Anders could spend more time with his patients. 

Seeing flashes of Fenris’s white hair glisten against the dull brown of Darktown _was_ something of a comfort. Still, he regretted having made the promise of revenge to Fenris, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to see it through to the end, because of Justice’s lack of interest and his own cowardice. And selfishness, of course. He lacked the means to get them to Minrathous, and he was sure Fenris did too, but part of him didn’t want to go to the Imperium now, didn’t want to see his oldest dreams fall to decay before him like the great edifices of Tevinter. 

In a break between patients, he glanced out the open door. All he could see of Fenris was his bare foot with its long toes and spider’s web of lyrium glistening in the light of the lamp outside. He watched Fenris’s toes curl and uncurl, barely stirring the dirt and filth beneath them, and a strange tenderness welled up inside him, like clean water seeping into a hole dug beside a stream-bed. _Andraste’s pudding-bag, man_ , he thought, pinching the bridge of nose, _you’re too old for this kind of nonsense. Mooning over an elf’s toes. Honestly._

Still, remembering the emptiness that had hollowed him out, the one that Justice tried so hard to fill with their fight for mages’ rights, he was glad to be filled with _something_ , even if it was deeply confusing tenderness for someone who usually acted like he hated Anders. Well, acted like he hated Anders between kissing him, of course. Even the old Anders would’ve hesitated before using Fenris for a bit of fun, but now that was out of the question. No, he genuinely _cared_ about the elf, a realization that left Justice radiating disapproval, disapproval that Anders himself didn’t totally disagree with. Fenris wasn’t a distraction, as Justice seemed to think, but he was a liability, a _weakness_. And Maker knew he had plenty of those already – a spirit in his head who sometimes took over his body, the taint of the Blight in his blood and wafting through his dreams like the stink of chokedamp, the fact that he was an apostate in a city with a mad Knight-Commander who used the Rite of Tranquility as a first option rather than a last resort. 

What could he offer Fenris? A clinic in Darktown that smelled like sick and unwashed bodies? A coat with feathers on the shoulders that were badly in need of replacing? Friendship, though the elf seemed uneasy with that at best. All he had was a fight he couldn’t win, and it seemed as though Fenris already had one of those. He did have connections, he supposed – the mage underground reached farther than Kirkwall, so a question asked about the magisters who had tormented Fenris could spread all the way to Tevinter like a Deep Mushroom stretching its tangle of roots through the soil. Just a mention of a name, a request to be informed when and by whom that name was spoken in Kirkwall. 

Telling Fenris of his intentions was out of the question, though – what if it all came to nothing? Ever since he’d met Fenris – well, after the elf had woken up anyway – he’d sensed a tension building in him, and most likely it had been doing so for months, if not years. Fenris had been able to release it in bursts in fights with templars and street toughs, and physically it seemed to manifest as that interminable fidgeting and twitching, but he was like a cat having the spot above its tail rubbed, and eventually he was going to break, erupt in indiscriminate fury, sharp claws swiping at whoever was within reach of them. Anders didn’t want to be the one to deliver a well-intentioned final pat and come away with his hand bleeding.


	12. Chapter 12

Fenris wasn’t sure how he’d gotten back to the mansion in Hightown that night. He _knew_ he’d taken a shortcut – helpfully pointed out to him by Anders – through what had apparently been the cellar of the now-abandoned Amell estate, though the place had been strewn with the telltale debris of slavers, and out into the quiet pre-dawn streets of Hightown. Perhaps _why_ he’d gone back to the mansion was a better question, though why he’d ever left it in the first place after finding Anders gone was an even more compelling one. Back in the rambling, dilapidated house, sitting in front of the cold hearth, he could still _smell_ the mage on his fingers, that bitter smell of human semen, though Anders’s had a faint tang of seawater in it that was new to Fenris. Worse, he could still feel him, cock hot and smooth like a sun-warmed plum in a Tevinter orchard, the trembling softness of his stomach as Fenris had run his hand down it, not the softness of fat or atrophy, but the taut, thin softness of fine calfskin, the warm slipperiness of Anders’s come trickling through his fingers. Worst of all, though, part of him _enjoyed_ it, part of him wanted to strip off his gauntlets, cup his hands over his face, and inhale; part of him wished he were back in that little nughole of a storeroom in Darktown.

The rest of him was choked with nausea, stomach cramping, bile sour on his tongue washing away any taste Anders might have left there. He’d staggered into the mansion doubled over and retched over the mushrooms growing up through the carpet, spraying them with syrupy saliva and a thin stream of stomach acid. He had promised himself that another mage would never touch him like that, that he’d never be used like that again, and yet he’d let Anders… what? As he stumbled down into the mostly empty wine cellar and gathered as many bottles as he could find, he replayed the scene in his head and realized that _he_ had done all the touching, all the taking. Anders, if anything, had been maddeningly passive, though Fenris could feel the frustration radiating off him so strongly that it was as if Anders’s magic were sparking through the air around him. It was not a comfort. If anything, the idea that he had _wanted_ to kiss the mage, _wanted_ to wrap his fingers around Anders’s cock and stroke it until Fenris had given him what he had taken from Anders on his own, the thought that he would have done more – all of it made the nausea churn higher in his throat. He climbed the stairs to the room where he slept, the room that still smelled faintly of Anders’s fever-sweat and the lyrium that had seeped out of him, spitting more bile on the floor between muttered curses as he went. 

He uncorked the first bottle and gulped down the dry, almost vinegary red wine. The scent of Anders on the hand clutching the bottle’s neck drifted to his nose, and he gagged, sputtering wine, feeling it burn through his nostrils and throat. He knew the wash-basin was empty – after Anders had left, he hadn’t bothered to keep it filled, so he tore off his gauntlets and splashed wine over his hands, scrubbing them dry on the upholstered arms of the chair. For a moment, he had the wild notion to strip off his armor and clothes, and douse the rest of his body in the astringent wine, burn away any physical traces of the night before he drank enough to sear any mental ones out of existence. 

Anders must have thought him a fool. A mage’s good opinion meant nothing to him, of course, but to betray his ignorance so clearly in front of one was intolerable. He hadn’t known what was meant to happen next. He knew what would have happened next with Danarius, and all of it involved Fenris on his knees. But he would _not_ kneel for Anders, and the mage had asked him what _he_ wanted, leaving it all up to him, so rather than look foolish by hesitating, he had finished himself off as quickly and cleanly as he could. That was embarrassing in itself – Anders must have been comparing him to all the others he’d had, to that Tranquil mage in the Chantry, and Fenris had been clumsy, had treated Anders as he would have treated himself. And he had been too eager, spilling in his own trousers without even being touched. 

He sighed, leaning back in his chair and scrubbing his hands over his face. They smelled only of the wine now, and relief settled over him, muffling the hint of disappointment that lingered in the pit of his stomach. The wine had done nothing to ease his confusion, though, and confusion did not sit well with him. Not that anyone _enjoyed_ being confused, but for a slave, confusion meant a beating or worse. Why had panic jolted through him when he’d found Anders gone? Why had that same panic been rekindled when Anders had said that he was going to stay at the clinic? It wasn’t as if he enjoyed the man’s company. Anders was an ally when he needed no allies – though remembering the struggle to claim the mansion in which he was sitting should have disabused him of that idea – and a friend when he wanted no friends. Coincidence and convenience had thrown them together more often than not. _You didn’t kiss him out of_ convenience. 

Perhaps he would have been able to explain away his own actions – after a few more bottles of wine, of course – had the situation not been further muddled by Anders’s. The man had apologized afterward and had sounded sincere, though Fenris was still unsure about what there was to apologize _for_. He wondered if apologizing for something one hadn’t caused was a Fereldan trait, though it seemed at odds with their reputation for being rough and ill-mannered. Perhaps it was a trait unique to Anders, because the citizens of Kirkwall didn’t have it – if anything they would make you apologize for something they’d done; Orlesians made a big insincere show of apologies as part of their Game; and apologies of any kind were seen as a weakness by magisters in the Imperium, who could, of course, never be wrong. It had almost seemed as if Anders had sensed Fenris’s embarrassment and shame at his inexperience, and had tried to soothe it away by taking some of the blame onto himself. 

The wine wasn’t helping. He got up and paced back and forth in front of the barren hearth, as if he could trample his confusion, worry, and disgust into the creaking floorboards. The room tilted as if he were on the deck of a ship, and he put one hand on the mantel to steady himself. There wasn’t enough wine left in the cellar to go on like this. He’d just have to ask Anders. Immediately. He slung his sword over his shoulder and headed back into the waning night, staggering in the direction of Darktown. 

  


The lantern was dark outside the clinic, the front doors shuttered and bolted. Fenris activated his markings and reached through the porous wood of the door, sliding the lock open. Inside, the clinic was dim, the cots and pillars casting long, dark pools of shadow. He stumbled among the camp beds and tables, cursing under his breath when he stubbed his toes on the splintery wood. At least he was giving Anders advanced warning of his arrival. 

When he lurched through the door to the storeroom, he found the lamp still lit, the wisp of fire magic still dancing in its glass prison. Anders was stretched supine on the cot, coat unbuckled and open, revealing the soft creaminess of his throat, so smooth compared to the fine lines that mapped his forehead and the skin around his eyes. Fenris could see a dark bruise on that whiteness, though, just under the mage’s sharp jaw, and for a moment, he tasted the salt of Anders’s sweat on his lips again, as he had when he’d coaxed his blood to the surface with his lips and tongue. His cock stirred at the memory, trying to stiffen against the tight confines of his trousers and the dampening effect of the wine still lolling through his veins. 

“Mage,” he whispered. 

Anders tossed his head on the stained, embroidered pillow, brows furrowing, and a low moan slipped from his lips, but it wasn’t the kind of moan Fenris had drawn from him a few hours before. The noise made goosebumps prickle over Fenris’s arms and crinkled the hair on the back of his neck – the mage sounded terrified, choked with dread, and yet also somehow resigned, as if he had already seen and accepted the method of his own death. _The Grey Warden nightmares_ , Fenris reminded himself, and he reached down to gently nudge Anders’s thigh. 

“Mage, wake up,” he said, raising his voice, but Anders only twitched in his sleep and muttered something about the Archdemon. Fenris leaned over and dragged one fingertip along Anders’s jaw, with the grain of his stubble, the dark gold hair feeling dense and smooth instead of rough. “Anders.” 

The mage’s eyelids parted then, a sliver of warm bronze showing behind his fine eyelashes, and he pushed himself up on his elbows, gasping for air as if Fenris had dragged him out of the canal instead of gently easing him from sleep. 

“Fenris!” Anders sat up and dug his fingers into his hair, grinding the heels of his hands against his eyes. When he took his hands away, the whites of his eyes were webbed with red, and he still looked as if he were halfway in the Fade, muddled and, as always, exhausted. “Maker’s breath, what are you…? I thought you’d left. It can’t be morning yet, can it?” He sniffed, his long nose hitching upward as the corners of his mouth turned down. “Did you fall into a vat of wine between here and Hightown? You’re supposed to drink it, not bathe in it.” 

“Why did you do it?” Fenris demanded. He didn’t want to have to explain trying – and failing – to drown what they’d done in a few bottles of turned wine. 

“Oh, Andraste’s arse, what are you blaming me for now?” Anders asked. 

Fenris shifted his weight and glanced toward the corner of the storeroom where he’d pushed Anders against the wall earlier. Anders followed his gaze, and some of the annoyance on his face softened, a tiny smile crimping the corners of his mouth. Still, instead of answering, he looked up at Fenris expectantly, wide-eyed with feigned innocence. Fenris sighed and glanced away, flicking some invisible dirt from his armor. 

“Why did you let me… pleasure you?” he muttered, feeling his cheeks flare with heat at the awkward, too-formal phrasing that came too easily to him and yet still managed to sound so stilted. 

Anders sank back down onto the cot, propping himself up on his elbows. “A handsome man had his hand down my trousers. I wasn’t going to say no.” His smile crooked into one of those grins that usually made Fenris grind his teeth in annoyance. “Especially since you went to the trouble of taking off your gauntlet.” 

“I… uh…” Fenris ducked his head, rubbing the back of his neck. The touch of his unarmored hand was strange, as if someone else’s fingers were brushing across the nape of his neck. He felt strange in general – he would have put the bubbling in his stomach down to the wine, but it wasn’t the gurgle of sickness churning there, rather an… effervescence, like the golden sparkling wines Danarius had imported from Orlais. He raised his eyes to look at Anders through the haze of his own hair, knowing his face was falling into those well-learned earnest lines. “You find me handsome?” 

Anders’s laughter cut bright as a saber through the murky air of the storeroom. “You know when we’re fighting slavers, and their leader yells, ‘Try to leave the pretty ones alive’?” He waited for Fenris’s nod before going on. “Have you ever noticed that they all mob me after that?” Anders settled back down on the cot, closing his eyes, a subtle dismissal. “Yes, Fenris, you’re very handsome. Now please go home.” 

****************

His fingers were full of magic, prickling along the lyrium in his palm like the tiny barbed legs of spiders crawling down his hand. After a moment, the wisp of the spell blinked out of existence and was replaced with the brush of Anders’s fingers, just grazing his markings with their callused tips as if trying to soothe away a hurt, and yet even that delicate of a touch hurt almost as badly as that of Anders’s magic. He tightened his hand convulsively into a fist, closing it off. 

“How was that?” Anders asked, tilting his head to one side, warm gaze like the reflection of the setting sun on clean window panes. “Better?” 

“It is manageable, yes,” Fenris replied, flexing his hands, the tips of his gauntlets clicking together. He supposed he should have been more suspicious as to _why_ Anders was trying to make him more comfortable with having his markings touched – perhaps the mage was planning to tap them for his spells and wanted to make sure Fenris made as little fuss as possible when he did, though it wasn’t the pain that made that unpleasant as much as the feeling of being an inanimate object, a tool, a means to an end, and even a lack of physical discomfort would not change that. 

Though he doubted that was Anders’s motivation, mostly because the mage was, for lack of a better word, _tactile_. He seemed to be forever touching Fenris, light, brief, casual touches, a brush of hair out of his eyes, a swipe of a thumb to blot away a drop of wine on his lip, fussing over him the way Fenris imagined mothers fussing over their children. Even when they were just patrolling the streets of the Undercity at night, Anders’s fingertips were always glancing over whatever piece of Fenris’s bare skin was within reach, as if Anders were trying to reassure himself that Fenris was still there. He supposed he should have been grateful that since Anders seemed unable to stop himself from touching Fenris, he was at least attempting to be considerate about it, which was far more than anyone else had ever done, that he could remember. 

Sometimes, though, he wished Anders would worry less about the markings and concentrate more on the rest of him – that night in the clinic storeroom, as desperate and awkward as it had been, had made him feel like a leaf unfurling after a long season of dormancy and straining upward toward the sun. He’d been numb, the only parts of him that could feel were the volutes of lyrium, and they registered only pain. But he couldn’t find the words to tell Anders this, and his body, which he was master of in battle, was fumbling and inarticulate with such things, no longer remembering the vocabulary of affection, if it had ever known it. His armor was another hindrance, meant to bruise and claw as much as protect, another barrier between his flesh and Anders’s, another way he’d kept himself removed from others. 

They were descending the long flight of stone stairs from Lowtown to the docks. It had been a quiet evening in Lowtown so far – both of them were free from their accustomed ornament of blood spatter, and the wind coming in from the bay smelled of salt and oyster liquor instead of sewage and decay. It blew the stray wisps of Anders’s hair, making the golden strands rise and sway like a cobra dancing for a snake-charmer’s flute. If their positions had been reversed, he would have reached up and tucked them back into the leather cord that held the rest of Anders’s hair, but such gestures did not come naturally to him. Touching others invited them to touch you back, and he couldn’t remember wanting that until now. Touching others also gave them a chance to slap your hand away or worse, though while Anders seemed to fear just that, it never seemed to stop him. 

He let himself drift closer to Anders as they walked down the steps, and when he was near enough to be able to pass it off as an accident, he brushed his index finger just below the frayed cuff of Anders’s coat, arching it back to keep his finger-guards from scraping the smooth skin, and followed the vein there down to where it branched at the wrist. Anders’s pulse tapped against the pad of his finger, and Fenris felt it quicken at his touch, until its beat was as rapid as the heartbeat of a startled sparrow. 

“So _that’s_ what my electricity trick must feel like,” Anders murmured, ducking his head. The stubble on his cheeks glittered gold in the torchlight as he smiled, and the reddish-pink flush on the crests of his cheekbones had nothing to do with the setting sun. 

“Are you implying I am a mage?” Fenris said, scouring as much emotion as he could from his voice. 

Anders laughed, that high, wild laugh, the one that reminded Fenris oddly of a cat trying to be wrestled into a sack. “I would say that I value my life too much to do that, but we both know that’s not true.” Fenris snorted, hoping that Anders would take it for the grudging amusement it usually signified, and pressed his finger harder against Anders’s wrist to feel the thrum of his pulse before letting go. In his mind he heard Anders’s voice chime like bells on a cold morning, _Did you ever think about killing yourself, Fenris?_ , and he fought the urge to catch hold of the mage’s wrist and tether him like a sail torn from its moorings. 

He heard Anders sigh and jerked his eyes forward to the square that spread out at the base of the stairs. 

“And I thought I was going to get some sleep tonight,” Anders muttered as they watched the armored and robed figures flood from the alleys on either side of the square and fan out to block their path. The dull, rusty light of evening caught on the dried-blood color of a cape, and realization and a sort of curdled surprise washed over Fenris like a wave of nausea. 

“Hunters.” He reached over his shoulder, fingers closing around the pommel of his sword. From the corner of his eye, he saw Anders slipping his staff from his back, hand out ready to cast. 

One of the mages stepped forward, a woman as fine-boned as an elf with hair almost the same dusty blond as Anders’s and a swagger to her walk that belied her small stature. Fenris recognized that saunter – it was the bravado all Laetans had when faced with those beneath them, and it turned quickly enough to cringing and bowing in the presence of a magister or even a high-born Altus, all part of that endless grasping for status in Minrathous. 

“Fenris!” the woman called, her strident voice ringing off the stone of the square. “You’ve escaped the magisters’ reach for too long.” 

“So, Hadriana finally dares to look for me in the city, does she?” he shouted back. He scanned the group of Tevinters and did not see the magister among them, though that was no surprise. Hadriana was a coward – she would only dare to face him if he was in chains. 

“Give yourself up,” the woman replied. “This is your last warning.” She wagged her finger at him like he was a misbehaving child, shaking her head as if disappointed in him. 

“Don’t be a fool. We will slaughter you all,” he said, trying to sneer as if the idea of a few dozen slavers, some of them mages, were any match for him and Anders. Anders may have appeared ready for a fight, his stance reminding Fenris that he had been a Grey Warden, his staff held like a weapon rather than a mere tool, but there was no sign of Justice, no crackle of sulfur or thundering voice. 

The woman ignored him and glanced at Anders, taking in the staff in his hand, the glow of magic around his outstretched hand, and addressed him, a hint of civility creeping into her voice, as if she thought she were speaking to a peer. _Perhaps she is_ , Fenris thought, stomach churning. “He is stolen property. Back away from the slave now, and we’ll let you go.” 

“I am not your slave!” Fenris yelled, drowning out any response Anders might have offered, probably something glib, inappropriate, or downright confusing. _What would you have said if it were Danarius standing there?_ he asked himself, and his hands trembled on the pommel of his sword, sliding in the sweat that suddenly dampened his palms. He sent a desperate glance toward Anders, unsure now of what the mage would do – would he run and leave Fenris to his fate or, worse, would he side with his fellow mages? A tiny whisper in his head said he was being unfair to Anders, that the mage had done enough to earn his trust, but he remembered too well the gleam of excitement in Anders’s eyes when he’d asked Fenris about the Imperium. 

Anders was smiling, a mild, almost indulgent smile, as if the slavers were a bunch of kittens gamboling in the square. “Suck on a fireball,” he said, and as if to punctuate his words, a clump of slavers exploded into flames. 

The Tevinter mage pounded her fist into her other hand, appearing unperturbed by the deaths of her _soporati_ compatriots, and shouted, “Wrong answer! Take the elf and kill the mage!” 

The slavers swarmed toward the stairs like ants, and Fenris rushed forward to meet them, markings glowing brighter than the fire raining down from the cloudless sky. His blade and his fist cut through flesh with equal ease, and as he spun and slashed, he kept one eye on the mage, safe in her blue bubble of magic. Eventually, the barrier would have to drop. 

Anders, though he sometimes made passing mention of his cowardice, cast spells at their attackers with the rhythm and regularity of a pounding heart, his magic caressing the lyrium in Fenris’s markings but never drawing from it, never cowering behind a magical barrier. The slavers scattered in confusion, shrieking as they burned or letting out a panicked gurgle as their bodies froze. 

But still there were too many for two to fight. Blades rent open Fenris’s armor, slicing the flesh beneath, shallow cuts intended to bleed him until he was weak but not to kill. Even his skin wouldn’t be worth much if it was poked full of holes. A slaver darted a quick slash across the back of his knee before Fenris twisted and tore out the man’s throat with a swipe of his gauntlet. They both fell to the paving stones, and Fenris saw his face, markings ablaze, reflected in a puddle of his own blood. 

“Mage! Healing would be welcome!” he shouted over the din of the battle. 

“This is wiping me out, Fenris!” Anders called back. The bursts of flame were smaller now, and Fenris could hear the mage’s labored breath, his small grunts of effort. He raised his head and saw a group of slavers surge toward Anders, barely held at bay by a sweeping curve of icicles that burst from his staff. 

Fenris tried to lever himself up using his sword but only managed to pull himself into an awkward kneeling position. Blood gushed down the back of his calf as he dragged himself toward the stairs and Anders. 

Across the square, the Tevinter mage’s barrier blinked once, twice, then went out. 

“Use my lyrium, mage!” Fenris yelled at Anders. “Hurry!” 

A moment later, magic tugged at his markings like the currents of a river, and the cool wave of a healing spell washed over him. He sprang to his feet, slipping in the blood on the paving stones, and sprinted toward the Tevinter mage, sword held low to thrust. She gestured with her staff as if to cast, but his blade caught her in the abdomen, and with all of his strength, he pulled it upward, tearing her open. Her staff fell to the ground with a thud, and her body followed a second after. Her death-glazed blue eyes stared wide with surprise at the night sky. 

The clamor of steel still echoed in the square, almost muffling the cry of “Give me a hand!” from Anders. Fenris raised his sword and raced toward the last clot of maroon-clad slavers, barely being held at bay by Anders’s fire. He cut and battered his way through them until Anders stood before him, splashed with blood, feathers singed, hair loose from the cord that usually held it. 

Anders’s gaze skittered over him, scanning for wounds, bruises, blood, but of the two of them, Anders looked far the worst for wear. Fenris took a health potion from his belt pouch and handed it to him, turning away as the mage gulped it down. 

“Thank you,” Anders said, a hint of a question curving his words upward. 

Fenris’s shoulder twitched, as if the mage’s gratitude were a fly buzzing around him, and he walked out into the square, going from body to body, looking for anything – a letter, a note, a map – that would lead him to Hadriana. He should have left the Laetan woman alive long enough for questioning, though he doubted she would have given him the satisfaction of an answer, but he had been distracted, not just by his need for healing but by seeing Anders almost dragged under by a tide of slavers. “It seems we are victorious,” he said. 

Fenris heard Anders’s footsteps behind him, but the mage merely fell into step beside him, making no move to touch him. He leaned heavily on his staff, though he hadn’t been limping and the potion should have healed any open wounds. Guilt like a fine needle stabbed at Fenris – Anders had been injured helping him – but he tried to brush it away. All of this was Hadriana’s doing, and beyond her, Danarius’s. It always was. 

“I’m assuming Hadriana didn’t make an appearance?” Anders asked. 

“No, but she wouldn’t. She is like a fat spider who will sit in her web until her prey comes to her,” Fenris replied. His fingers knotted around the pommel of his sword so tightly they almost cramped, and he forced himself to sheathe it. 

“Charming,” Anders murmured. “Should we search the bodies?” 

A whimper, almost a mewl, drifted across the square, and they followed the thin, pained noise to the crumpled body of a mage, his blood blending with the maroon on his robes. The man was trying to crawl, groaning with every move, but sank back to the ground with each attempt. Fenris crouched over him, straddling the man’s back to pin him in place, and grabbed a fist full of his hair, yanking his head back. The torchlight flickered over the Tevinter’s face, revealing the terror in his eyes. 

“Where is he?” Fenris growled, but before the mage could answer, he slammed the man’s head against the paving stones. 

“Please, don’t kill me!” the man groaned. He tightened his grip on the man’s hair, reining in the urge to light his markings and shove his fist straight into the mage’s skull, and smashed his face on the ground again. “Tell me!” 

“I don’t know, I swear,” the man blurted through another moan of pain. “Hadriana brought us here. She’d heard someone in Kirkwall was making inquiries about her, and she thought it must be you. She’s at the Holding Caves, north of the city. I can show you the way.” 

“No need. I know which ones you speak of.” 

The man stared up at him, a beseeching look in his gray eyes. He sounded on the point of sobbing. “Then let me go. I beg you. I swear I won’t—” 

“You chose the wrong master,” Fenris said, his words trampling over the man’s continued yammering. He let go off the mage’s hair, grabbed his head in his hands, and with one swift twist, snapped his neck. Keeping his back to Anders, not wanting to see the disapproval narrowing his eyes and tightening his mouth, he stood. “Hadriana. I was a fool to think I was free! They’ll never let me be!” 

When he whirled around, though, Anders was white, so white that Fenris wondered if he hadn’t been injured after all. He looked shocked… and somehow sheepish, his eyes sliding away from Fenris’s. “Who is this Hadriana?” he asked, his voice bland, careful. “I know she is a mage, but how did your path cross hers?” 

“She is my master’s apprentice, a sniveling social climber who would sell her own children if she thought it would please Danarius.” He started pacing, leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the white stone. Anders watched him, some color coming back to his cheeks but that guilty, furtive expression still darkening his eyes. “I assumed she would be here at Danarius’s bidding, but that mage said someone in Kirkwall had been asking questions about her, and it has certainly not been me. I only wanted to see that bitch again if she was spitted on the end of my sword.” 

Anders winced as if he were feeling the point of Fenris’s blade pressed against his gut. “Fenris, I—” 

“If she is at the Holding Caves, we must go quickly, before she has a chance to prepare or change her mind and flee back to Minrathous,” Fenris said. 

“Now?” Anders asked. “Tramping around the Wounded Coast at this time of night sounds like an excellent way to get, well, _wounded_. We can go in the morning – I’ll go with you, of course….” 

Fenris stopped pacing and stared at him, and again Anders’s eyes skittered away like bronze beetles. “You would do that?” 

That finally made Anders look at him, and when he did, his eyes were wide, imploring, gilded by torchlight. “Of course I would. You’ve done as much for me. And…” He took a deep breath, feathered shoulders rising and falling heavily. “It’s my fault she’s here.” 

“What?” Fenris shouted, his markings flaring alight without a thought. Anders took a step back and almost stumbled over the body of the Tevinter mage. 

“When you told me you couldn’t be free while she and Danarius were alive, I… I asked for help from the mage underground,” Anders said, his raised hands, long and pale, small white flags of surrender. “Only for information, I swear! And I didn’t say _why_ I was asking. I had no idea she’d actually come to Kirkwall.” 

“ _Vishante kaffas_!” Fenris snapped, spitting on the paving stones by Anders’s boot. “I should have known better than to trust a mage! No, I should have known better than to trust an abomination!” 

Anger began to replace apology in Anders’s face, his eyes narrowing, glittering briefly with the blue sparks that meant Vengeance was clawing his way to the surface. “I was trying to help you, Fenris! I want you to feel free, you idiot!” 

“I _am_ an idiot,” Fenris replied. “And you were right about one thing, _mage_ – the first reason you gave me not to trust you didn’t end in my death, but it might end in yours.” 

Anders pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut, but when he opened them again, they shone with earnestness. “Fine, hate me. Blame me. Believe whatever you want about me. All I ask is that you promise me that you won’t go to the Wounded Coast tonight.” 

Fenris gave him a final glare over his shoulder, the spikes of his pauldrons slashing across his view, making it look as if Anders were being enveloped by jagged black fingers. Then he turned his back on the mage and headed toward the stairs to Lowtown, hearing Anders call after him, his voice as raucous as that of the crows that had already come to feast on the bodies.


	13. Chapter 13

The wine cellar was not an option. Though a few weeks had passed since he’d doused himself in wine, the room where he slept still smelled of vinegar and raisins, and the odor turned his stomach on the best days. Now it made sick rise in his throat, bile washing over his tongue. That night, he’d tried to drink to forget, though, and now he wanted to remember. He wanted the mage’s betrayal to remain sharp and bright in his memory, so he would never let himself be duped again.

A few bottles still sat on the table, and he hurled them into the unlit fireplace, glass sparkling in the candlelight as it showered down. The floor glittered with tiny shards, another place in this mansion that was meant to be his home where he could no longer go. He was closing himself in, walling himself off – in the past, he might have felt safer or as if he had a strategic advantage of some kind, but now he simply felt isolated. When they had first realized they were being attacked and Anders had set himself for battle, fire blazing from his fingertips, Fenris had – for the first time that he could recall – been comforted by the thought of someone fighting beside him, rather than indifferent or inconvenienced by it. But never again. 

Fenris threw himself into the chair and rested his elbows on his knees, burying his face in his hands to shutter out the flickering candlelight, the faint cries of the cats begging for their milk, the dust that perpetually rained from the ceiling. He felt calcified, as though if he sat still long enough, he would harden, freeze, turn to unfeeling stone. Was that what he wanted? Was that what he had run from Danarius for so many years to achieve? Would that be freedom? 

Behind the visor of his cupped hands, he was too aware of his breath, the sound of his inhalations and exhalations filling his ears, loud as the dying gasps of a Revenant. Through that huffing came the distant sound of a door creaking open, of footsteps squelching in the rotten carpet. He should have lowered his hands, grabbed his sword – after all, who was to say that Hadriana wouldn’t send more of her lackeys after him when none returned from the first bunch – but he remained where he was, hoping his indifference would serve as armor, and listened to the footsteps, only one set of them at least, approach. Whoever it was plodding noisily up the left-hand staircase knew to skip the fourth step too, which always screeched like a dragonling when stepped on. Not that Fenris had doubted for a second who it was – no self-respecting Tevinter slave-hunter would ever have made that much noise. 

“You’re still here,” Anders said from the doorway. He sounded out of breath – as if he’d run all the way from Lowtown or had especially exerted himself in making as much noise as possible – and relieved, the kind of relief that buckled knees with its intensity. Fenris took his hands away from his face and glanced over at the door; the mage was clutching the doorjamb as if his grip on it were the only thing keeping him upright. 

“I did not want you to follow me, mage,” Fenris replied, turning back toward the fireplace. He should have built a fire. At least then he would have had something to stare at while Anders whined at him. He sank lower in his chair, legs sprawled out before him. 

“I wouldn’t have had to if you’d given me a chance to explain,” Anders said. The words had a sharp edge to them, but he still seemed hesitant as he took a few steps into the room. 

“Explain, if you must. I doubt anything you say will change my mind.” 

“Nothing ever does,” Anders muttered. 

Fenris pursed his lips to hold back a smirk. He could never decide if the mage was a hypocrite or completely lacking in self-awareness, but a third option presented itself – one of Anders perceiving but Justice judging, the two halves reaching one whole and imperfect conclusion. What must it be like to know your own mind so little, he wondered, or to know only the mind of another being who sometimes used you as a mouthpiece. 

Anders sighed, unslung his staff from his shoulder, and laid it on the bench in front of the fireplace, carefully and deliberately, as if he was trying not to startle Fenris. It seemed more like he was trying to buy himself some time to sort out what he wanted to say, which was a rarity for Anders, from what Fenris could tell. He kept looking down at Fenris, opening his mouth as if to speak, then snapping it shut and turning away. The fact that Fenris was staring at him in silence seemed to unnerve him even more; his gaze lit on Fenris’s and then dashed away just as quickly. Finally, he wandered over to the fireplace, looking down in surprise when his boots crushed the glass carpeting the floor in front of it, and put his hand up on the mantelpiece. For a few long moments, they both contemplated the invisible fire. 

“I should have told you,” Anders said. “Or asked you first. I know that. It’s just…” He spun away from the fireplace to face Fenris, desperation a frantic glimmer in his eyes, his eyebrows pinched together. “What if nothing had come of it? What if you had been disappointed and it was my fault?” 

Fenris snorted, feeling a pang of satisfaction when Anders winced at the sound. “Do you think I’m that delicate?” 

“No, it’s not that.” Anders gave a small, unsteady laugh. “It’s me. I’ve disappointed everyone I’ve ever met – my parents, my mentors at the Circle, Karl, my fellow Grey Wardens, Justice… Perhaps I was hoping to break my habit of being a disappointment.” 

“But it never occurred to you that I would like a warning?” Fenris asked, digging his clawed fingerguards into the arms of his chair as if they were Hadriana’s throat. 

Anders shrugged uncomfortably, twitching his shoulders upward with a frown as if his hideous coat had suddenly shrunk and fit too tightly. “You never seemed like the planning type, I suppose. And I was expecting that the information would precede Hadriana herself.” His fingers worried at one of the bandages wrapped around his sleeve – Fenris had always wondered about them, whether they were to hold together the fraying coat itself or to patch up the mage beneath it. “I knew I couldn’t get us to Minrathous – and that probably would have been a disaster anyway, to face them in their own city – but I wanted to do _something_.” 

“I – thank you.” Against his will – he _wanted_ to hate Anders, he always had; it was easier, cleaner – fissures breached the hard shell he’d been constructing for himself, and he felt it start to flake away like dried mud in rain. How could it be that easy? Should it have been? How much was he willing to forgive, and why was that forgiveness even an option? Perhaps this was what friendship was, but he still could not say he considered Anders a friend… though if he was honest, he wasn’t sure _what_ he considered Anders to be, other than a confounding nuisance. “And I would not say you’re entirely disappointing.” Anders arched one eyebrow at him, the corner of his mouth curling up, wavering dangerously close to a leer. “I’ve seen plenty of Fereldan refugees who seemed satisfied with their mended bones and cured diseases.” 

Anders made a sound in his throat – a confused, breathless combination of a grunt and a whimper – as if he’d been punched in the chest and didn’t know why, which was foolish, since there were many reasons to punch Anders, all of them compelling. And then he was swooping down on Fenris like a seabird, though that could have been the beak of a nose and the silly feathers on his coat more than anything. 

Fenris dug his heels into the floor and tried to push himself upright, but before he could move, Anders was kneeling between his legs, long-fingered hands reaching up to twine into Fenris’s hair. One shuddering, warm breath buffeted his lips, as if the mage were steeling himself for something, before Anders kissed him, once, twice, quick sips from his mouth. Fenris sat inert, hands still gripping the arms of the chair, feeling himself lean in to meet each kiss but unable to make himself do anything else. 

“Tell me to stop if you want me to stop, Fenris,” Anders murmured, his voice husky as if he’d just been roused from a deep sleep and was still half-mired in dreams. His thumbs followed the curves under Fenris’s cheekbones, and the tip of his nose brushed Fenris’s – by accident, he thought, but then Anders did it again, just the faintest tickle of contact that still made Fenris shiver. “I don’t think I can otherwise.” 

“No.” 

“Oh, thank the Maker,” Anders breathed and kissed him. 

He understood then that Anders had been holding back before, because now it seemed the mage’s lips, hands, and tongue were everywhere as they kissed, fingers fumbling at the buckles of Fenris’s breastplate as his tongue swept over the soft flesh of his lower lip. Fenris craned his neck into the kiss, opening his mouth wider to Anders, the dampness of the mage’s lips clinging softly to the dryness of his own, the briefest tug before Anders leaned in again and pushed his tongue against Fenris’s. 

His upper body was draped over Fenris like a feathered blanket, warm and surprisingly heavy, but his fingertips were cool when they brushed Fenris’s bare skin. He squeezed his thighs against Anders’s sides, holding him there, and the mage groaned and dug his hand into the upholstery of the chair next to Fenris’s head, tugging himself even closer, until Fenris wondered if he might suffocate in the wet warmth of Anders’s mouth, the hot exhalations of his breath across his cheeks. Still, he closed his eyes and delved his tongue between Anders’s lips, one hand leaving the arm of the chair to clutch at the threadbare fabric of the mage’s coat. 

Blood throbbed in his groin, and when Anders’s stomach brushed against his erection, he thrust his hips upward into the friction without thinking. Anders moaned, and his fingers worked harder at the fastenings on Fenris’s armor, until finally he tossed the breastplate aside with a muffled _clang_ , followed by his belt. A quick twist of his wrists tore Fenris’s linen tunic, and Anders pushed it open, baring his chest, the torn edges dangling to either side like the broken wings of a gull. 

Panic began to thrum in Fenris’s gut, a strange counterpoint to the hum of his arousal – he felt too bare, exposed, flayed. Anders pulled away for a moment, bowing his head to survey the flesh he’d bared, and Fenris let out a growl of annoyance and tried to find the mage’s lips again. His markings flared, turning the whitish-silver lyrium to curves of blue fire, and he knew that he was preening under Anders’s gaze and hated himself for it. Danarius had demanded such things, had taken pleasure more in the display of his own power in Fenris’s body than in looking at Fenris himself, as if Fenris were a mirror in which the magister could admire his own reflection. 

But now the glow of the lyrium revealed the reverence in Anders’s eyes as he stared at Fenris’s chest, and that stare was like a potion, spreading warmth through his veins – Anders was looking at _him _, seeing _him _, and enjoying what he saw. Fenris watched as the mage’s eyes followed the lines down his abdomen to the faint gleam seeping from the waistband of his leggings. For a moment, he thought he saw the vortices of flame swirl into Anders’s eyes, but when he blinked, they were gone, and Anders was leaning toward him again, soft lips pressing against the apex of his chin, between the two bowing lines of lyrium there, to the unscarred skin that Fenris had thought had forgotten how to feel.____

___The unscarred flesh was waking up now, subsuming the constant burn of the markings, as if Anders had cast one of his resurrection spells on it. His lips flitted between the branches of lyrium just under the corner of Fenris’s jaw, then skimmed down to his chest, still never touching the markings. Fenris thrashed like a fish beached on the shoals by low tide as the tip of Anders’s tongue flicked over first one nipple, then the other, each teasing dash of wetness followed by a kiss. His cock pushed against the laces of his trousers, and he willed Anders to untie them and free it, but instead the mage brushed his fingers along the slats of his ribs where the lyrium didn’t reach, following the lines of muscle that hooked over Fenris’s hips with his fingertips, coming tantalizingly close to the waistband of his trousers before sliding away again._ _ _

___“Mage,” he said through clenched teeth. A clear note of warning rang in the word, though he wasn’t sure _what _he was warning Anders of. He would not use Anders as he had been used – even when the mage was at his most infuriating, and even though every ounce of him yearned to feel Anders’s mouth, warm and wet, around his cock.___ _ _

___Anders glanced up at him, and the candlelight caught his eyes and turned them the mellow, smoldering orange-gold of a tiger’s, peering at Fenris through gleaming strands of hair that had sprung loose from their cord. A querying arch of an eyebrow, the dart of a tongue over smirking lips, and Fenris forced himself to look away, swallowing hard. Anders laughed softly and pressed his face against the straining laces of Fenris’s trousers, the hum of his laughter vibrating against his erection. Fenris sank his teeth into his lower lip, biting until he tasted blood, but he couldn’t keep his hips from bucking upward, pushing the bulge between his thighs against Anders’s cheek. He felt like his skin would split from this teasing, split and turn inside out, the lyrium seams bursting from years of pent-up and frustrated desire, desire that had had no outlet, desire that he could barely even have imagined._ _ _

___“You’re bleeding,” Anders murmured, and again Fenris heard the words and felt them simultaneously._ _ _

___“What?”_ _ _

___“Your foot,” Anders replied, his voice still sleepy, and turned his face to meet the insistent upward push of Fenris’s hips, lazily mouthing his erection through the spirit hide of his leggings, teeth the faintest graze of pressure on the underside of Fenris’s cock. For a moment, he seemed so preoccupied with nudging his face into Fenris’s crotch that Fenris thought he might finally unlace him, but then Anders said, “You must have stepped in that glass. Do you want me to heal it?”_ _ _

___“If you wish,” Fenris replied, making no effort to keep the disappointment from his voice._ _ _

___The cool brush of healing magic swept over his foot, the burn of his markings reasserting itself as the spell touched them, and he heard the faint tinkle of glass hitting the floor. Then Anders’s hands were sliding up his legs, abuzz with that electricity that had haunted Fenris’s dreams for months now, caressing his knees and the insides of his thighs until they twitched. But before the tiny filaments of lightning could reach his crotch, they died, and Anders’s fingers, unwreathed by magic, pulled open the laces and started to tug his trousers down. His cock, lyrium markings still glowing, bobbed as he lifted his hips so Anders could pull his leggings over them, and brushed against the mage’s hair, leaving a glistening streak of pre-come in it, silvery against the gold. He reached up to smooth it away, but Anders caught his hand and kissed the palm of it, the blue of the lyrium gleaming in his eyes as he looked up at Fenris._ _ _

___“Maker’s arse,” Fenris groaned._ _ _

___“Everyone becomes an Andrastian when they’re getting fucked,” Anders said with a grin. He dropped Fenris’s hand and began kneading the muscles of Fenris’s thighs, following the movements of his fingers with his lips, running his tongue along the striations of his quadriceps, still avoiding the lyrium that arched over them._ _ _

___“Am I going to be fucked?” Fenris asked, meaning it as a joke but unable to mask the impatience in his voice. The words tasted strange in his mouth – he couldn’t remember having said them certainly, but he couldn’t remember ever having been eager to ask such a question, to actually want to hear the answer._ _ _

___Not that Anders gave him an answer, though, at least not one in words. Instead he just buried his face in the small valley where Fenris’s leg met his groin and began to gently suck the skin there, as he stroked Fenris’s thighs, nails grazing them in ever-shrinking arcs. Hands trembling, Fenris unbuckled his gauntlets and vambraces, and let them slip to the floor. Bare-handed, he reached for the sleek gold of the mage’s hair, but his hands hovered uncertain in the air, flexing and relaxing as if they were arguing with themselves over touching it. Finally, his fingertips skated over the edge of Anders’s broad, white forehead and into his hair, combing through it, and he marveled – with a flicker of shame at his own stupidity – at the feel of Anders’s skull under his fingers, the rounded contours of it, its solidity and yet the fragility of it – with his markings ablaze as they were, he could easily have shoved his fist through the bone._ _ _

___Anders seemed to melt against him at the touch, and a soft moan reverberated against his flesh before Anders turned his head and ran his tongue over Fenris’s balls, its rough surface catching lightly on the soft, loose skin of them. His fingers tightened in Anders’s hair, and a groan tore from his throat even as he tried to swallow it down, squeezing his eyes shut, as Anders gently took one into his mouth and sucked, then moved on to the other. The mage’s long fingers, webbed with strings of Fenris’s pre-come, softly cradled his cock, thumb brushing over the head of it._ _ _

___Fenris hissed in frustration as Anders’s mouth left him, even though the mage’s fingers were still caressing his cock._ _ _

___“Would it… hurt?” Anders asked, his voice hesitant, not a quality Fenris normally would have associated with him. He opened his eyes and looked down at the mage, and Anders must have seen the question in his eyes, because he continued. “With the markings. You’ve said they’re painful before, and I… the last thing this should be is _painful_.” It was then that Fenris realized that Anders’s fingers had only been trailing along the top of his cock, where the lines of lyrium were fewer, just the tapered ends of the markings that interwove thickly on the underside of it. _ _ _

__“I cannot say,” he admitted grudgingly, hoping that Anders wouldn’t change his mind about the whole thing. “I could tell you if it, uh, became unpleasant?”_ _

__Anders smiled up at him so brightly that Fenris thought he felt warmth sheeting off him. Then the mage dipped his head and ran the smooth underside of his tongue over the head of Fenris’s cock. He arched up from the chair at the touch, hands gripping the armrests until they cramped. Anders waited until he’d settled back against the cushions before wrapping his lips around Fenris’s erection and slipping him into his mouth, the tip of his tongue feathering over the markings on the underside of it. And yet Fenris felt no pain, only a steady throb of ecstasy gushing through him, making his knees go weak, his thighs quiver._ _

__The mage looked up at him as he bobbed his head up and down Fenris’s length, watching him for any sign of pain, but soon his amber-brown eyes sank shut as if he were trying to block out anything that would distract his attention from sucking Fenris’s cock. One hand, slick with spit and come, stroked up to meet his lips, while the other traced along the smooth skin under Fenris’s balls. Anders pressed a certain spot there, and pleasure exploded through him, quickening that ecstatic throb into a pound. He didn’t want Anders to stop, wanted this to go on as long as possible, and yet he knew he was nearing the precipice, control crumbling under him._ _

__“Maker’s breath,” he murmured, unable to hold himself back from thrusting up into the hot wetness of Anders’s mouth. As if to oblige him, Anders slid him all the way into his mouth, the tip of his nose brushing the base of Fenris’s cock, and swallowed, his throat contracting around the head of Fenris’s erection. The pressure that had been building in his groin surged, and he felt like he was staring at the room through a tunnel of gray fog that blurred the edges of his vision. His muscles knotted in rhythmic waves, and yet he felt strangely helpless, pinned under Anders, head rolling back and forth on the cushion of the chair._ _

__But then Anders’s hand slipped lower, one fingertip shyly circling Fenris’s arsehole, and Fenris bolted up, trying to twist his hips away from Anders. His cheeks burned as he felt himself soften, panic churning through him and washing away the arousal that had been pulsing up and down his body. Anders had pulled away, sitting back on his heels, though his other hand was still wrapped around Fenris’s cock, giving it long, slow strokes._ _

__“All right?” he asked._ _

__Fenris nodded, hoping that Anders wouldn’t press him as to _why_ he’d squirmed away, not wanting to taint this with the shade of Danarius or Hadriana, his years of being acted upon, of being taken from, of being forced to give against his own wishes, flimsy though a slave’s wishes were. But Anders just smiled, licked his lips, and leaned forward to drag the broad side of his tongue up the underside of Fenris’s cock. He took Fenris back in his mouth and found his rhythm again, his hand caressing the inside of Fenris’s thigh but never dipping lower. _ _

__He sank into the feeling of Anders’s mouth on him, the sucking lips and pumping hand, his mind blocking out everything else – the knowledge that he would have to face Hadriana, the fact that a mage was enthusiastically sucking his cock, the burden of knowing that both of them might die the next day. Fenris let himself be tugged into the vortex of his own arousal, spinning tighter and faster inside him, until he was overwhelmed by it and came with a muffled groan, emptying himself into Anders’s mouth._ _

__Worry fluttered in his stomach, weak against the satiated bliss of his orgasm, as he wondered if he should have warned Anders, but the mage didn’t seem to mind – he hadn’t spit Fenris’s spunk onto the floor and was still dabbing kisses along the length of his softening prick. For a moment, Fenris wanted to reach down and gather Anders in his arms, an odd gush of affection for the mage flooding through him, but he grasped the arms of the chair and fought it down._ _

__“This is one of the reasons I fear being made Tranquil, you know,” Anders said. His voice, though soft with contentment and almost dreamy, rent the silence of the room, making Fenris jerk. He glanced down at the mage, raising a questioning eyebrow. “I mean, losing my magic and my connection to the Fade would be the worst part, of course,” Anders explained. He nuzzled his face between Fenris’s thighs, and Fenris heard him inhale before he started dropping kisses over his thighs, balls, the curve of his now-limp cock._ _

__“What do you mean then?” Fenris prompted when it seemed Anders had lost his train of thought._ _

__“The Tranquil can’t feel any kind of passion,” Anders replied. “They have no desire.” He ran the tip of his tongue along the rim of Fenris’s head, and Fenris swallowed down a moan – he was still too sensitive, even the gentlest contact almost painful, and yet his cock stirred again at the touch of Anders’s tongue. “So if I were Tranquil, I wouldn’t have wanted to do this.” To Fenris’s mingled relief and disappointment, Anders rested his chin on Fenris’s thigh, looking up at him, his hands still brushing the outside of Fenris’s thighs, tickling over his knees._ _

__“You _wanted_ to do this?” Fenris asked, hoping his incredulity wasn’t too obvious. The mage had clearly been _willing_ , but the idea that Anders had enjoyed sucking him off, had done it for any other reason than to please Fenris, baffled him. _ _

__“Of course,” Anders said. “Why wouldn’t I?”_ _

__“You haven’t – I mean – you don’t…” he trailed off in a strangled cough. His blood was calming, cooling, thickening into syrup, and all he wanted to do was sleep, rather than trying to puzzle out the intricacies of Anders’s motivations for sucking cock. He was distantly aware that he was stroking Anders’s hair and made himself stop._ _

__“Ah, _that_ ,” Anders said and stretched himself up to kiss him again, his body pressed against Fenris’s, his erection nudging Fenris’s stomach. “I got so excited I almost set your bed on fire,” he murmured against Fenris’s mouth, his fingers trailing along his cock. _ _

__Indecision battled in Fenris as he kissed Anders – trying to give what Anders had just given him would surely be an embarrassing disaster, and he was certain another quick hand down the trousers would be unsatisfying as well. “I don’t know what I can do for you,” he admitted, throat tight with embarrassment._ _

__Anders kissed him again, sucking gently on his lower lip before pulling away and looking up into Fenris’s eyes. Fenris glanced away – Anders was so close that he must have noticed the heat flooding Fenris’s cheeks. “You don’t have to do anything for me,” he said and then settled against Fenris once more, kissing along his jawline._ _

__Fenris’s nerves, just starting to recover after his orgasm, jangled, acid roiling in his stomach. He was unused to proximity without purpose – he had finished, Anders claimed he expected nothing in return, so why was the mage still heavy against him, his heartbeat a slow thud that Fenris could feel in his own ribs? “Would you not be more comfortable somewhere else? The other chair, perhaps?”_ _

__The mage’s hair tickled Fenris’s jaw as Anders shook his head, and when he spoke, his voice was muffled, his face buried against Fenris’s neck. “The floorboards are a bit spongy with rot, so they’re actually quite easy on the knees.”_ _

__Fenris sighed. He should have been preparing for the journey to the Wounded Coast to finally have his revenge on Hadriana, but instead he was sitting in a chair with his cock out, being slowly suffocated by an over-affectionate mage. And yet now he was combing his fingers through the downy hair at the nape of Anders’s neck. This time he didn’t stop himself. “Mage, why are you here?”_ _

__Anders slid down so that his chin was resting on Fenris’s chest. “I came to apologize. Did I ever do that, by the way? Things took a turn,” he replied with a grin, running his hand over Fenris’s cock, his smile deepening when Fenris rolled his hips up to meet the brush of his palm. “Unless you mean something more… metaphysical?” Fenris wasn’t entirely sure what “metaphysical” meant, so he just raised a quizzical eyebrow and stared at Anders until the mage went on. “I’m sure most people would say I’m here because the Maker willed it or some such rubbish.” He shrugged, seeming much more interested in coaxing Fenris’s cock back to life than discussing such matters._ _

__“No, I meant why are you in Kirkwall?” It hadn’t been what he’d meant at all, but Anders seemed even more talkative than usual, and curiosity had pricked at him. He himself had ended up in Kirkwall by accident – it had just been the closest place to run after the last time the Tevinter slave hunters had found him and was large enough to offer some measure of protection._ _

__“Oh,” Anders said. His hand left Fenris’s crotch, and he stood up and walked over to the fireplace, his boots crunching the glass beneath them. Fenris, watching him and noting the slump of his shoulders, took the opportunity to tuck himself back into his leggings and wriggle out of his torn tunic. “I’m probably one of the only people who actually _wanted_ to come to Kirkwall other than to escape the Blight.” His soft sigh drifted in the quiet air to Fenris’s ears. “I tried many times to get here when I was still in the Fereldan Circle. For Karl.” _ _

__The name hit Fenris like a maul, though he couldn’t quite say why. Sometimes when Anders mentioned the Tranquil mage in passing, Fenris had felt tiny conflagrations of what he’d eventually realized was jealousy spring alight inside him, and he’d told himself it was envy of a friendship, of having shared memories and a shared history with another, but it had become clearer and clearer that friendship had not been all Anders had felt for Karl. But why would he envy that? Anders was free enough – too free even – with… sexual favors, and the mage was, Fenris admitted, always willing to help when asked. He didn’t want or need anything else from the man, nor should he have been envious that a now-dead mage had once been the focus of Anders’s attentions. “I see.”_ _

__“He was transferred to Kirkwall after our Harrowing, so I tried to follow.” Anders laughed softly, but there was no mirth in it, only bitterness thick as burnt treacle. “I got here eventually. When it was too late. By then I’d merged with Justice, and when I read Karl’s letters about the abuses in the Kirkwall Circle and saw the suffering of the refugees here, Justice and I both decided to stay. To be honest, if I had tried to hop a ship to Amaranthine, I think Justice would’ve taken over and marched me right back to Darktown.”_ _

__“Were you and Karl… did you…?” Fenris left the question unsaid, hanging in the air, hoping that Anders would fill in the gaps for himself._ _

__Anders jerked his head up and stared at him for a moment, his eyes hard and cold as fragments of tiger’s eye._ _

__“Yes.” The word was as brittle as a poorly quenched blade. The mage chewed on his lower lip for a moment and then said, “Well, I thought. I loved him. He loved me, just not in the same way.”_ _

__Fenris’s markings hummed for a moment as magic enveloped Anders’s hands, and the mage created a tiny whirlwind, sucking up the shards of broken glass from the floor. They spun over his fingertips, whirling, flattening, and then expanding into a glistening green globe. Fenris watched it spin between the mage’s hands, made even paler by the glow of his magic. It was the first time he’d seen Anders use magic for no useful purpose beyond his own amusement or a need to occupy his hands, and he thought about running through the groves at Danarius’s summer estate, just for the pleasure of feeling his muscles work._ _

__“But you…” he began, trying to broach the subject, but his own lack of remembered experience, the alien notion of love, kept tying his tongue into knots._ _

__“We were lovers, if that’s what you’re asking,” Anders said. “But for Karl, that part of it was just youthful experimentation, I guess. When you’re at the Circle, you become starved for any kind of contact – it’s all forbidden, you see, and besides, if you care too much about something or someone, you just make it easier for the templars to punish you.” His voice caught, as if he were choking back a sob. “It definitely worked on me.”_ _

___And yet you still have not learned_ , Fenris thought. He had felt himself scabbing over like a wound as slowly as his markings had, but eventually he had made himself numb and impervious, and wrapped in that numbness, he had survived every attempt to retake him, traveled hundreds of miles alone through Thedas while innocent of the world outside the Imperium. Anders, on the other hand, was still like a house with its shutters thrown open, so receptive that he’d taken a dying friend into his own body. And yet there was an element of punishment to it, of self-flagellation, of prying scabs off his wounds so he would never heal. _ _

__“Karl grew out of it,” Anders continued, “and I didn’t. When I arrived at the Fereldan Circle, I didn’t speak until Karl befriended me. It’s hard not to be devoted to someone who saved you.” He gave Fenris a sad smile and tossed the globe of green glass to him._ _

__Fenris caught it, cradling it gingerly in his hands. “Such things are kept quiet in Tevinter. Between nobles, at least.” A sourness coated his tongue, and he fought back the urge to spit. “Magisters and nobles have their favored slaves for such… relationships.”_ _

__“But the slaves have no choice!” Anders protested, startling Fenris with his vehemence so much that the glass ball almost slipped from his grasp. “They cannot say no, so it’s no better than the templars and how they use the Tranquil in the Circle.”_ _

__“Some slaves welcome the attention,” Fenris replied, his back teeth clenched. “It elevates them over other slaves. They swallow their disgust if it shows that they are valued above all others.” “But not you,” Anders said. It was not a question._ _

__Fenris shivered – it must have been the cool surface of the glass globe clutched against his bare chest, the sweat cooling on him in the drafts from the holes in the roof. “No.”_ _

__Anders seemed to tremble too, stray wisps of wheat-gold hair quivering – whether out of sympathy or from an actual chill, Fenris couldn’t tell – and gave him a look that would have once made Fenris bristle – he would have read pity in those saltwater-brown eyes – but instead he felt… understood. It was a strange but not unwelcome sensation, and he wished that the mage were leaning against him again instead of standing across the room. He palpated the surface of the glass sphere, feeling it smooth and cool under his bare fingertips, half-expecting to hear the _tink tink tink_ of his steel gauntlets on the thin glass. _ _

__“Will you help me kill Hadriana?”_ _

__“Yes,” Anders said, his reply treading on the heels of Fenris’s question, his eyes wide, brows raised. “Of course. The clinic can spare me for one day.” He sighed, the feathers on his pauldrons fluttering as his shoulders rose and fell. “In fact, I should probably get back. We can meet at the city gates in the morning, if you like.”_ _

__“You are welcome to stay,” Fenris offered, hearing that formality creeping back into his voice, as if he were offering one of Danarius’s noble guests a night’s accommodation. Anders’s head was bowed, and he looked up at Fenris and then toward the narrow bed from under his fine brows. “I will sleep in the chair,” Fenris said, scrambling to his feet, still holding the glass globe Anders had made in the crook of his arm. He placed it carefully on the table, making sure it couldn’t roll off and shatter, and then dragged the chair closer to the bed._ _

__“I never imagine you sleeping,” Anders said. Fenris had his back to him, but his voice sounded nearer, like a warm breeze on the back of his neck. His heart thumped, out of rhythm, sending a dizzying gush of blood to his head, at the idea that Anders thought of him when he wasn’t around. To be wondered about, considered, worried over. “You slept almost a week when you were injured, but that was different.” There was a thoughtful pause. “I’ve never seen you eat either, come to think of it. If I weren’t keenly aware of how solid you are, I might think you were a spirit.”_ _

__Fenris felt the heat of Anders’s body against his back and then the damp pressure of his lips on the nape of his neck. The mage’s arms draped around his waist, squeezing his sides as if reassuring himself of Fenris’s solidity._ _

__“No, definitely _not_ a spirit,” Anders murmured, nudging his face into Fenris’s hair. Anders’s erection pushed against his arse, and Fenris’s stomach churned, that confusing muddle of desire and disgust twisting inside him. In spite of that, he hardened in response, cock pushing at the loose laces of his trousers. He was sure that Anders wouldn’t have protested if Fenris had bent him over the bed and fucked him right there, but he couldn’t. He shouldn’t _want_ to, no matter what Anders had done for him… was doing for him. _ _

__The mage’s hand crept down Fenris’s stomach to the front of his half-unlaced trousers and dipped inside, fingers wrapping around his cock. Fenris leaned back against him, head resting on Anders’s shoulder, turning his face toward the warmth of Anders’s throat and the gilded glossiness of his hair._ _

__Anders bowed his head, and his lips dragged along the markings on the side of Fenris’s neck, the tip of his tongue leaving a warm trail as it traced them. “That doesn’t hurt, does it?” he asked, his voice lower, a rumble against Fenris’s ear, so deep that if he hadn’t known better, he would have thought that Justice had taken hold. He somehow doubted that a spirit of Justice was very interested in stroking an elf’s cock, though. He shook his head – it didn’t hurt any more than it had when Anders had dug his fingernails into his thighs when Fenris had come – and Anders sucked harder at his throat, no longer trying to avoid the lyrium as he had been earlier._ _

__“You sing to me, Fenris,” he whispered, and Fenris heard that low thunder quake through his voice again. He frowned – when had he ever sung a note for the mage? – but perhaps people often said strange, nonsensical but poetic-sounding things in such moments, and the confusion was quickly swept away by the slow, languid caress of Anders’s hand on his cock. “Do you know how I ache for you? I didn’t know I could ache like this anymore.”_ _

__He felt enveloped by Anders, consumed by him, the mage’s hand stroking his cock more urgently, his mouth seeming to draw the lyrium from his flesh, his arms gathering Fenris against him. Images, confused, shattered as if they’d been painted on broken glass, exploded behind his closed eyelids – a girl’s brilliant red hair burning brighter in the sun; green eyes the same shade as his own, the anger in them an echo of that which seethed in him; a small, pale hand laid across his, the dark skin of his own unmarred by lyrium. And then, under the rasp of Anders’s hectic breath, a voice calling a name that he knew was his and that he couldn’t understand. He jerked in the mage’s grasp with a choked cry, his markings flaring to life, and it took all his control to not simply phase through Anders’s arms._ _

__“Fenris? What’s wrong?” Anders asked, voice higher again, perhaps with worry, and to Fenris’s relief, he let go of him and stepped away, leaving only one steadying hand on his back._ _

__Fenris’s knees buckled, and he sagged onto the bed, propping himself up on his hands. “I—I don’t know. I felt… I thought…” He shook his head, the bedspread blurring before his eyes. “Perhaps I’m just tired. And the thought of confronting Hadriana tomorrow is… disconcerting,” he admitted grudgingly, as if the magister’s apprentice herself were in the room, waiting to gloat at his weakness as she always had._ _

__Anders’s hand stroked the length of his spine, and the mage said, “I’ll take the chair. Go to sleep, Fenris.”_ _


	14. Chapter 14

They left at dawn, the red threat of sunrise lurking on the horizon, and walked in silence as paving stones became sand beneath their feet. Silence usually seemed to chafe at Anders, but that morning, he appeared to accept it, whether from nerves, concern for Fenris, or an unwillingness to fight what was clearly inevitable. Fenris had been rebuilding the wall between them all morning, brick by brick, since he had awakened with Anders’s bare feet, white as bleached bone and speckled with faint freckles like sparrow’s eggs, resting on his own legs. He’d watched the mage sleep for a few minutes, his body slumped low in the chair, long legs stretched out onto the bed, watched the purple-tinged skin of Anders’s eyelids shift as his eyes rolled behind them, and wondered what Anders was seeing in the Fade. Was he even Anders in his dream or did his spirit take over, wanting to enjoy those brief returns to its former home? Fenris remembered the distant thunderous rumble in Anders’s voice as he’d kissed his neck the night before and shuddered. The bricks in the wall between them might have been Fenris’s own discomfort with intimacy – physical, emotional, friendship or otherwise – with anyone but with a mage in particular, but the mortar was that third presence, Justice or Vengeance, spirit or demon, always lingering, ready to seize control of Anders.

The mage had smiled up at him when Fenris had given him the cheese and ham he’d found in the cellar and sawn the odd-looking bits off of; he’d clearly wanted Fenris to respond with a word or a touch, to acknowledge what had happened the night before. When nothing was forthcoming, he’d turned his attention to the cats swarming around his ankles, begging for a nibble of the old ham or a scratch under the chin. Fenris watched them with a frustrated envy he knew was absurd – Anders’s attention would have been his for the taking, but he couldn’t make himself speak; no appropriate words presented themselves. He wanted to be rid of Hadriana and now was his best and perhaps only chance, but he also wanted to stay in the mansion with Anders, with Anders’s hands on him, Anders’s lips on his. And yet he hated himself for wanting that at all. Not for the first time, he longed for the simplicity of slavery, of never having to make decisions. 

So they trudged along in silence until the briny scent of the open sea scrubbed the air clean of the stench of Kirkwall. Crags of gray rock rose ahead of them, the shifting, nacreous light revealing the dark opening of a cavern burrowed into one of the cliff faces. Fenris knew the so-called Free Marches were peppered with these caverns, like wood bored through by woodworms, and though he could no longer remember having been held in one of them, his stomach still twisted at the sight. 

“Is that it?” Anders asked. He sniffed, as if scenting the air, and then grimaced. “They’ve been doing blood magic. I can feel it everywhere. They must still be here.” 

“We should be careful. Hadriana will do anything to protect herself. Maker knows what kind of traps she’s set for me,” he said, staring at the cavern entrance as if his eyes could penetrate its blackness if he gazed at it long enough. 

Anders reached out as if to pat his shoulder, seemed to remember the spikes on Fenris’s pauldrons, and let his hand fall back to his side. “We’ll find her, Fenris.” 

“Let’s hope this isn’t a waste of time,” Fenris muttered. The chase had to end – he was not sure what was over the horizon, beyond Hadriana’s death and hopefully Danarius’s after hers, but he would never discover it without passing those milestones first. Part of him feared the uncertainty, as if he were sailing toward the edge of the known world, but the only other option was retreading the same old ground over and over. Nothing could grow in such tamped-down, trod-upon soil. 

“Well, even if it is, at least we got some fresh air,” Anders replied, his voice almost a chirp. What an insufferable traveling companion he must have been, Fenris thought, the type to stay up on deck rhapsodizing about the beauty of the open sea while everyone else was down in the hold being sick. 

“Once we’re inside, leave Hadriana to me,” Fenris said. 

“I’ll try.” Anders worried his lower lip with his teeth. He looked as though he was trying to decide whether he should bite back his words or release them. Being Anders, he chose the latter. “Justice might take over. Or if… something… happens, Vengeance, I suppose. But as long as I have control, I’ll watch your back and let you take care of Hadriana.” 

Fenris nodded, a quick jerk of the head, not trusting himself to speak or even look at Anders. He had never known the feeling – or couldn’t remember it – of being valued for _who_ he was, rather than for _what_ he was. Not that he was quite sure why Anders should value him at all, but it seemed the mage would have considered his loss regrettable. He rolled his shoulders as if he could throw off the confusion and stepped into the darkness of the cavern with Anders on his heels. 

Inside, the stench of old blood – the rusty smell of human and the more acidic tang of elven – hung in the dank air, so thick Fenris could taste it on his tongue. He sank his teeth into his lower lip and swallowed hard to keep himself from gagging. Anders, at least, seemed unfazed by the odor – the Deep Roads must have made him accustomed to fetid smells and living in Darktown could only have further increased his tolerance. 

“They’re still here,” Fenris said, his voice reverberating in the stone corridor, echoing back at them until it dissipated into the crackling of the flames that danced behind rusted iron grilles along one wall. “Good.” 

They passed through a heavy stone door, and a cavern yawned before them, silent gloom filled with redstone columns covered with Tevinter carvings of slaves in agony. His skin crawled as they passed the engravings, weaving their way through empty corridors and chambers populated only by corpses, flayed on rough wooden tables, their blood collected in buckets, left behind once it had served its purpose. 

“See for yourself, mage.” He gestured toward the bloated, blood-blackened body splayed out on the table. Dried blood spattered the floor as well; he curled his bare toes away from the splashes of it, thick and sticky as it dried. “The legacy of the magisters.” 

Anders’s lip curled in disgust at the sight, and Fenris could see the faint blue lines seething just under the surface of his skin that told him Justice was infuriated as well and being barely held in check. As much as the spirit unnerved Fenris, it did have its uses, not least of which was making Anders nearly unstoppable. 

“There must be mages in Tevinter that don’t use blood magic,” Anders said. “Clearly Hadriana is not one of them, but they must exist.” 

“Of course,” Fenris replied. “There are slaves. Magisters do not hesitate to collar their own kind.” He saw Anders flinch from the corner of his eye. “As for the rest, I heard of a magister in Qarinus who tried to use blood magic on his own son to make him amenable to marriage. And in my own experience, Danarius once killed a little boy to fuel blood magic to impress his fellow Senators at a party. A child’s life for a parlor trick!” 

He swung his eyes to Anders, and satisfaction – petty though it might have been – settled over him at the look on Anders’s face, shock, disgust, disappointment, and yet under it, crisscrossed by the blue cracks that still hinted of Justice’s presence, stubbornness. 

“So _all_ the magisters use blood magic?” 

“Why must you go on about this? No magister would turn down an advantage over his rivals. If he did, he’d be dead,” Fenris snapped. “I’m sure that in the rest of Thedas, mages can just be people like anyone else, some good, some bad,” he said, not really believing himself, but suddenly wishing to smooth away the frown on Anders’s face, the furrow of his brow, all the fine lines that must have been etched into his skin by the tortures he’d suffered for being a mage, “but power corrupts, and it has corrupted the magisters absolutely, and they will always find a way to justify their need for it.” 

“You know, to use blood magic you must look a demon in the eye and accept his offer,” Anders replied. “I just figured some of them would say no. For aesthetic reasons, if nothing else.” 

“How does your spirit of Justice feel about you turning such things into a joke?” Fenris asked. His jaw was twitching, almost cramping from being clenched so hard. Why must the man be so maddening? The night before, he had been careful, considerate, but now he was back to being glib, flippant, as if looking at pictures in a book made him more of an expert on the Imperium than someone who had lived in it. 

“He’s not fond of it, but it’s the trade-off for me not being able to drink anymore,” Anders said. “You have to have some way of coping with all the misery in this blighted world.” 

Fenris stopped, his feet skidding in the ancient dust that coated the stone floor, and turned to Anders. “You cannot be nervous about this. I have seen you face dozens of templars seemingly without a care for yourself. You were a Grey Warden. Why should this unsettle you?” 

Anders brushed his fingertips over his brow, bowing his head, hiding his face from Fenris’s eyes. “I can’t believe you…” He half-turned away from Fenris, hand leaving his forehead to rub the back of his neck. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Fenris stared at him, and his stillness seemed to irritate Anders even more. “You know, Fenris, if it were up to me, I would just _say_ things, but you… sometimes that’s not the best tack with you. It’s hard to tell how you’ll react, for one, and for another, sometimes it’s only safe to speak when your gauntlets are off and your fuck-off giant sword is out of reach.” 

“Hadriana may die of old age before you get around to telling me,” Fenris said. 

The mage looked at him then, face slowly sliding into a grin like the sun breaking through morning clouds, and he laughed, an incongruously joyous sound in that hopeless place. Shaking his head, Anders said, “If you haven’t figured it out, you’re thicker than a dragon omelette.” 

Fenris crossed his arms over his chest, tapping his fingerguard against the vambrace of his other arm, the _tap-tap-tap _that always seemed to unnerve Anders so much echoing in the gaping chamber.__

__“All right,” Anders said. “I _am_ nervous. But not for me. Because you being here at all is _my_ fault. Clear enough?” _ _

__Fenris schooled his face to complete stillness, that stony look he’d perfected as Danarius’s bodyguard, utterly stoic and implacable. He’d used it on Anders before, and it seemed to annoy the mage, perhaps because Anders himself was incapable of controlling his expressions, or perhaps because he couldn’t read anything into the opacity of the look. “Yes.”_ _

__“All right then,” Anders replied with an abrupt nod. “So let me have my stupid jokes.”_ _

__“If you must,” Fenris said. “We are wasting time here. We should move on.”_ _

__Anders was quiet after that, except for the thud of his boots on stone. They passed through another stone door and were faced with yet another, though behind this one, Fenris could hear the scuffle of boots, the faint clang of steel and creak of armor. He activated his markings, filling the small corridor with their light, and together they burst through the door into a hall teeming with slavers. The men fell before them and were replaced by hissing skeletons, hobbling clumsily along. Their blades, for all they looked too heavy for the corpses to wield, cut as deeply as any others, and soon Anders’s healing magic was swirling around him._ _

__Hadriana and the slavers before her had spared no expense on the traps rigged about the place – floor tiles tripped roaring plumes of flame when stepped on, darts shot from the walls – and everywhere armored slavers lurked behind columns. Anders and Fenris burned and slashed their way through the corridors, up stone steps, through booby-trapped chambers, until they reached the holding pens, a large room lit by milky coastal sunshine raining down through a skylight. More slavers rushed them from the shadows and were soon added to the piles of twitching dead in their wake._ _

__An elvhen girl, emaciated as a doll with its stuffing torn out, her cheekbones nearly cutting through the skin of her cheeks, crouched in front of one of the huge iron holding pens. She stared up at them with wide green eyes set in shadowed hollows as they approached, and he could see the fear in them being replaced by an expression he knew his own face must have had – mindless adoration, a childlike willingness to be led, to be used. _She has no concept of freedom_ , he thought, rage filling him until he felt taut with it, near to bursting. _ _

__“Are you hurt? Did they touch you?” he asked her, gingerly helping her to her feet._ _

__“They’ve been killing everyone!” she cried. “They cut Papa, bled him….”_ _

__“Why? Why would they do this?” He knew the answer, though, had told Anders as much already, and yet it made no sense – slaves were valuable, difficult and sometimes dangerous to come by, and Hadriana was willing to slaughter them for her own precious safety? Which was not a surprise either – the woman had always been a coward, though usually her fear of Danarius’s displeasure had outweighed any other concerns._ _

__“The magister,” the girl replied. “She said she needed power, that someone was coming to kill her.”_ _

__Fenris bowed his head, the weight of his responsibility like an anchor tied around his neck and dropped into the sea, dragging him under. Anders rested his hand on the small of his back, the lightest of touches, and he wished the mage’s fingers would tighten around the buckles of his armor and haul him back up into the light and air._ _

__“Do you need healing?” Anders asked the girl. “I’m going to use magic on you, but I promise it will do you no harm.” He cast a spell, the lyrium in Fenris’s markings vibrating, and turned to Fenris. “She’s unhurt. Half-starved, but unhurt.”_ _

__“We tried to be good,” the girl went on, as if Anders hadn’t spoken. “We did everything we were told. I don’t understand.”_ _

__After knowing both slavery and freedom, Fenris himself still didn’t understand the capricious paradox of slavery – one was good to please one’s master in order to ensure one’s safety, to constantly remind the master of one’s value, and yet following the master’s orders often forced one to endanger the master’s property by carrying them out. He wanted to say something, to reassure her, but his freedom had opened a gulf too wide for him to breach._ _

__“You’ll be safe now,” Anders was saying, his voice the soothing one he used with his youngest patients. “We’ll get you out of here.”_ _

__“Everything was fine until today,” the girl said, tears fracturing her words. She trembled like a sapling in the wind, narrow shoulders quivering._ _

__“It wasn’t,” Fenris said softly. “You just didn’t know any better.”_ _

__Anders’s fingertips were stroking his back through the slit in his armor, and he shivered at the touch before stepping away, anger coiling hot and tight in his stomach. He hated that he was comforted by it, hated that Anders would presume to comfort him, hated that he _needed_ comfort. How long had he relied totally on himself? Since the day he’d killed the Fog Warriors and escaped Danarius, he hadn’t needed anyone. He couldn’t – wouldn’t – start now. _ _

__“Are you my master now?” the girl asked, her eyes suddenly bright with hope. She took a step toward him, and he stumbled backwards away from her, arms up as if to fend her off._ _

__“No!” The anger in him had distilled, concentrating into rage – he was furious in all directions, at Danarius, at Hadriana, at Anders for forcing his hand, at this wretchedly skinny elvhen girl for not understanding the difference between freedom and slavery, even though she had never known anything other than servitude._ _

__“But I can cook! I can clean!” she said, disappointment making her gaunt face appear even more drawn. “What else will I do?” _She just wants purpose_ , Fenris thought, remembering his own floundering in the days after Danarius had left him behind on Seheron, when he’d found himself in that bizarre purgatory between freedom and bondage. _ _

__“She could help Lirene,” Anders suggested. “I don’t know how well – or if – Lirene could pay, but she’s always complaining about the refugee women. I’m sure she’d welcome someone with useful talents.”_ _

__“So she’d be trading slavery for slavery, what an excellent idea!” Fenris said, turning to face Anders. The mage had been smiling at the girl, one of those kind, encouraging smiles that made refugee children believe that the elfroot potion he was giving them would taste like sweets rather than bilge slime, but it slipped from his face when he looked at Fenris._ _

__“It would be a job,” Anders replied, mouth twisting. “She’d be paid in room and board, but she’d be able to come and go as she pleased.” He looked past Fenris, addressing the girl as if Fenris weren’t even there. “Go to Lowtown, in Kirkwall, and find a shop called Lirene’s Fereldan Imports. If you tell the woman there that Anders sent you, she will help you.”_ _

__“Oh, praise the Maker!” the girl cried. “Thank you!” She ran off the way they had come, fleet as a deer on her spindly legs._ _

__“You had no right to do that!” Fenris snarled._ _

__“And what were you going to do? Have her go to your mansion and pick the mushrooms out of the carpet? Pay her in chewed-on corpses and empty wine bottles?” Anders snapped, the blue cracks in his skin burning brighter for a moment. The sarcasm in his voice was like sand scraping across raw skin. “Maker’s breath, Fenris, I was trying to _help_. She wasn’t your responsibility alone.” _ _

__“Wasn’t she? Her family wouldn’t have been killed if not for me.”_ _

__“Maybe they wouldn’t have been killed _today_ ,” Anders pointed out, leaving the rest unsaid. Fenris knew that in a household like Danarius’s, under Hadriana’s brutal yet haphazard supervision, most slaves were worked to death well before their time. “And besides, you wouldn’t be here if not for _me_.” _ _

__“I, uh, you have a point. My apologies,” he said, giving Anders a curt bow. How Hadriana would have cackled if she’d seen that, he thought as he straightened up. The chains were gone, but was he really free? “Come. Let’s find Hadriana and be done with this place.”_ _

__  
Fenris’s skin itched with newly healed scars. He pushed his fingers into the burned hole in his armor where one of the slavers’ traps had caught him and scratched his ribs, his nails scraping away dried blood. Anders limped along beside him, speckled with blood, a scorch mark streaking over one steep cheekbone. _ _

__“Is there any chance she burrowed all the way back to Minrathous?” Anders grumbled. “How much farther can these tunnels go?”_ _

__“Hadriana has never been one to lead from the front,” Fenris said. “But we must be close.” He glanced over at Anders – the mage was pale, grim-faced, and from time to time, Fenris had felt his magic brush against the lyrium in his markings without actually tapping it. “We should rest first.”_ _

__Anders nodded and sank to the floor, rooting around in his belt pouch. He pulled out a lyrium potion and gulped it down, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Do you have any stamina draughts left? I might have to save my strength for healing, so I don’t know how much help I’ll be.”_ _

__Fenris crouched beside him, resting his sword across his knees. Anders, leaning against the red stone wall, rolled his eyes in his direction, as if turning his head were too much trouble. “When we do find Hadriana, use my markings, if you need them. They will work whether I am alive or dead, so if I should fall….”_ _

__“No,” Anders said. “I won’t allow it.”_ _

__He dropped his head to hide his smile from Anders. The determination steeling the mage’s voice was almost enough to make Fenris believe he was right. If Anders could find a way to keep them alive on stubbornness alone, they would have been invincible. “You can be sure that she’ll hide behind her barriers for as long as possible.”_ _

__“Neither of us are strangers to waiting,” Anders replied with a hint of a shrug. “Help me up?”_ _

__Fenris reached for the mage’s hand and stood, pulling him to his feet. Anders’s palm pressed against his, and then Anders laced his fingers through Fenris’s fingerguards, grasping so tightly that Fenris expected Anders’s palm to come away with a brand of lyrium burned into it, a mirror of his own. His eyes were level with the mage’s lips – he could see every faint crease in them, every tarnished gold thread of stubble fringing them. He shouldn’t have been thinking about those lips wrapped around his cock, the soft tug of them, the damp heat of them. _Another reason to survive this_ , he told himself. _ _

__Anders’s breath had the clean sharpness of lyrium, like a breeze after a thunderstorm. Fenris shifted his weight from foot to foot, tension tightening his spine, coiling at the base of it – if Anders hadn’t been holding his hand, he would have been fidgeting as he always did when the need to move became too difficult to resist. If he flexed his arm the slightest bit, he could pull Anders against him, feel the warmth of his body directly rather than just feeling it radiating off of him. But instead he held still, waiting, sharing the air between them._ _

__Anders nudged his cheek against Fenris’s temple and murmured, “Good luck, Fenris.” And then his fingers were sliding out from between Fenris’s, and he was stepping away, leaving Fenris to teeter unsteadily on his feet as bright flashes of memories burst behind his eyes – the ribbons of red hair again, but now an older elvhen woman, sad-eyed but smiling, and a garden in the stark Tevinter sun, rigid in its lines yet somehow lush. For a moment, he felt grass tickling the soles of his feet, smelled the bitter headiness of orange groves. He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead as if he could compress the strange glimpses of someone’s life – his own? – until they shrunk to invisibility._ _

__“And to you,” he managed to choke out._ _

__They shouldered open one last stone door and crept into a hallway hazy with smoke and disturbed dust. Fenris activated his markings, turning the dust spinning around them into blue sparkles, and when blue light began to seep from invisible cracks in Anders’s flesh, he felt they were mirror images of one another, a bright candle flame dancing with its own reflection in a smoke-darkened looking glass. The corridor opened into a room, a dead-end, and there was Hadriana, flanked by slavers, already behind her glowing barrier, her opaque pale blue eyes glinting at him through the shield of magic. With a wordless shout, he hurled himself toward her, sword swinging, sparks flying from the blade as it glanced harmlessly off her protective magic._ _

__When the slavers lay groaning their last in pools of their own blood, she summoned shades that curled up from the floor like plumes of smoke, their unearthly croaks resounding in the room. Magic thrummed in the air, making his markings vibrate so hard he thought the lyrium might be beaten from his skin in motes like dust from an old carpet. He could feel Anders tapping them occasionally, a gentle pull that was a reassurance rather than an indignity. No sooner had the shades fallen than corpses burst through the tiles, hissing as they pulled themselves up through the floor and hobbled after Fenris and Anders. Hadriana cast silvery bubbles of magic that hovered briefly before exploding, knocking them from their feet and the air from their lungs, but these were few, as if she were flagging already, and as soon as she’d called them, she ducked back behind her barrier._ _

__Fenris circled her, waiting for the barrier to falter, darting in to stab and slash when it did. Dark fans of blood spread across her light blue robes – Danarius would have been so disappointed; he always expected his lackeys to make a good appearance – and the sight almost made him forget the sting and throb of his own wounds. He tasted blood in his mouth and couldn’t tell if it was his own or Hadriana’s or the anticipation of killing her manifesting itself as a coppery, cloying flavor on his tongue._ _

__The barrier flickered, faltered, guttered like a spent candle flame. One of Anders’s fireballs burst across Hadriana’s chest, hurling her to the floor, and she lay there at Fenris’s feet, her breath a rasping rattle that filled the chamber. Her staff had fallen just out of her reach, and she rolled onto her side, arm straining to grasp it. Fenris stepped between her outstretched fingers and the staff – he was tempted to kick it away but realized he’d rather watch her struggle for it, would rather she have at least some hope so he could have the pleasure of stamping it out, as she had done so often to him._ _

__And yet, even lying there in a heap, her robes girdled with blood, breath a coarse, desperate whistle, she was not broken enough – he imagined that if only she stood, it would be him cowering at her feet again, rather than the reverse. Panic gushed through him, hot and sour into the back of his throat. He had to end this. He could not take the chance that she would slip away, that Anders would intervene – _would he_? Keeping his eyes fixed on Hadriana, Fenris raised his sword over his head, ready to bring it scything down on her. _ _

__“Stop!” she cried, raising one hand, not glowing with magic now but rather soaked in blood, as if that frail collection of skin and bone could repel his blade. “You do not want me dead!”_ _

__He would have laughed if his jaws hadn’t been clenched too tightly for any sound to escape. The stench of sulfur burned in the air, and Fenris felt the twin blue whorls of Justice’s eyes boring into his back. His hands trembled on the pommel of his sword, but he flexed his arms, raising the sword higher. “There is only one person I want dead more.”_ _

__“I have information, elf, and I will trade it in return for my life,” Hadriana panted, as if the breath were being squeezed from her lungs by an invisible fist. She fell back against the floor as soon as the words had left her lips, exhausted by forcing them out._ _

__Fenris scoffed. “The location of Danarius? What good will that do me? I’d rather he lose his pet pupil.”_ _

__“You have a sister,” Hadriana choked out. Her voice was weaker, and on her long, narrow face, he saw something he had never seen there before – and had never imagined he would see – something like sadness or remorse. _Probably at having to play the only remaining card in her hand_ , he thought. Hadriana was only capable of regretting something she personally had lost. “She is alive.” _ _

__His jaw fell open, and cold fangs sank into his spine, as if Anders had cast Winter’s Grasp on him. But this cold was not of the protective numbness sort – this was the cold yet searing pain of a frostbitten limb being thawed._ _

__The shock that must have been clear on his face seemed to rejuvenate Hadriana. She sat up, and though her voice was still breathy, it was stronger. “You wish to reclaim your life? Let me go, and I will tell you where she is.”_ _

__She was on her knees before him, a pose he had all too often been in, their positions reversed. He hesitated a moment before sheathing his sword. Everything in him cried out that it was a lie, a trap – his mouth tasted like the filth she’d used to hide in his food; he ached as if recalling every beating he’d suffered at her hands – and yet… what if it were true? The memory of red hair danced across his vision like flames. Hadriana would say anything to save herself, even the truth, even something that would help him. As much as she must have loathed him, she would always love herself more._ _

__“Fenris? Do you believe her?” Anders asked. Fenris kept his gaze fixed on Hadriana, but he felt Anders’s warmth at his shoulder, could see the fissures of blue light from the corner of his eye. His voice had hints of Justice running through it like dark threads. “How can you know she’s telling the truth?”_ _

__“You can’t,” Hadriana said, though Anders hadn’t addressed her, and laughed, that condescending laugh she’d always used when watching him pick himself up off the floor after a beating, when he gagged on the bread filled with weevils she gave him, when he stumbled over the chains binding his legs to one another. “But I know Fenris, and I know what he’s searching for. If he wants me to betray Danarius, he’ll have to pay for it.”_ _

__Fenris felt Anders’s curious gaze on his face like a touch, and for a moment, he feared that Anders would ask Hadriana just what she knew. In all the years since he’d gotten his markings, he’d never reconciled himself to the idea that there were people – his enemies, his torturers – who knew more about him than he knew about himself. He sometimes questioned if he _wanted_ to know who he’d been. Anders seemed to vacillate between embarrassment, shame, disappointment, and a kind of fond indulgence toward his former self when he spoke about the man he’d been before he met Justice – what if Fenris had been a thief or a murderer or worse? Surely that sort of depravity was engrained so deeply in a person that not even losing one’s memory could completely obscure it. At least he could be certain he hadn’t been a mage, and now the idea of two mages – even one who had helped him, whom he should have considered something like a friend – discussing who he’d been, as if he were a character in a story, made him bristle. _ _

__But Anders just said, the shrug almost audible in his voice, “It’s your choice, Fenris.”_ _

__As if realizing that her fellow mage wasn’t going to give her any aid, Hadriana turned her frigid stare on Fenris. “You want to know who you were? Then let me go.” The unspoken “slave” seemed to drift in the musty air between them._ _

__He bowed his head and took a deep breath, the smell of blood, of lyrium, of burnt feathers filling his nose, coating his lungs. Hadriana’s eyes followed him expectantly as he walked over to her, though he noted with a distant satisfaction that she shied away from him, cringing back at his approach._ _

__“So I have your word?” she asked, her words hurried, almost panicked. “I tell you, and you let me go?”_ _

__Leaning close enough to see her heartbeat stirring her disheveled black hair, he looked directly into her eyes, his own reflection stretching over the milky blue of them. His face, even distorted, looked calm, almost mild. “Yes,” he said, the word as sharp and abrupt as a sword thrust. “You have my word.”_ _

__“Her name is Varania,” Hadriana breathed in a rushed babble as if she could taste her freedom, her victory, and was trying to hasten it. “She is in Qarinus, serving a magister by the name of Ahriman.”_ _

__“A servant? Not a slave?”_ _

__“She is not a slave,” Hadriana replied, and for the first time, Fenris heard something servile in her voice, as if she knew her response would please him and was glad of it._ _

__“I believe you,” he said. Light the same pale blue as her eyes flashed across her face as he let his markings flare. Her wide-eyed gaze scanned his face as he stood, perhaps trying to read his intentions in his expression, and he saw hope in her look, hope that turned to terror as he plunged his hand into her chest. Her heart was soft and pliant in his palm, like a silk purse – he’d expected to be as hard and shriveled as her soul – and she gave one strangled gasp as he crushed it in his fingers, gauntlets tearing through it. She slid to the floor, eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling, and he felt... not relief, not triumph – he felt the same. Hadriana was dead, and nothing had changed. He turned his back on her corpse and brushed past Anders._ _

__“We are done here.”_ _

__It was not Anders who answered, but Justice, booming voice bouncing off the redstone walls and re-echoing in Fenris’s ears. “That action was not just.”_ _

__Fenris spun to face Justice – no, it most certainly wasn’t Anders, not with those sparking blue tempests for eyes that were so empty compared to the changeable warmth of Anders’s, those looks that could feel like a caress – his markings blazing, as if he could reach into the mage’s body and pluck the spirit out himself. “Why not? Because she was a mage? May she rot, and all the other mages with her!”_ _

__Somehow confusion shone briefly in Justice’s eyes – it was the first expression Fenris had seen on the spirit besides that of anger. “No. You gave her your word and you broke it. That is unjust. You should offer penance.”_ _

__“Penance? For killing a slaver? A _monster_?” Fenris spat on the tiled floor. “That’s what her bloody deal was worth!” He jabbed his finger at Justice’s chest, the claw of his fingerguard almost touching the fabric that covered the scar over Anders’s heart, the killing blow that Justice had saved him from. “Which of you is the hypocrite, _spirit_? You or Anders? Or both? You are happy to kill templars for doing to mages what Hadriana has done to me. Why should I not have my vengeance as you have yours?” _ _

__The spinning flames were shuttered as Justice blinked, and when his eyes re-opened, they were brown again, or a thin rim of brown around the black of Anders’s pupils. “Fenris? Are you all right? I… I suppose Justice had something to say,” he said, attempting a smile that faltered and dissipated almost immediately._ _

__“Yes, and I’ve heard enough from both of you to last me an age! You saw what was done here. There’s always going to be some reason, some excuse why mages need to do this.” He clenched his fists, the tips of his fingerguards digging into the lines of lyrium on his palms. The pain was almost a comfort, an old friend who had been with him since the moment he had awakened after the ritual, who had never left him or betrayed him. He forced himself to meet Anders’s stare, which was becoming more mulish by the second, the mage’s stubbornness always the first to recover – after his mouth, of course._ _

__“And here I thought you were unreasonable,” Anders said, and Fenris shuddered at the deceptive mildness of his tone, casual yet flippant, as if implying that Fenris’s anger was an over-reaction, a lack of control. That from a man who was overtaken by a spirit of Justice or Vengeance when he was angry. But worse, the tone implied – to Fenris – that Anders considered Fenris’s struggles so much less worthy, so much less important than his own._ _

__“All that matters is that I finally got to crush that bitch’s heart.” He sneered, baring his teeth, and felt a stab of petty gratification when Anders flinched and looked away. “Now your conscience can rest easy, mage. And you and your spirit can be taken by the Void for all I care.”_ _


	15. Chapter 15

The words skittered over the page like insects, leaving black blurs in their wake. Anders blinked, hoping they would settle into legible lines again, but his thoughts were as jumbled as his writing, and he tossed his quill down and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. To say that it was tiredness would have been a given but also a lie or, at best, an over-simplification. The clinic _had_ been overrun with patients for the past week, a flood of raving Lowtown folk who frothed with incoherent rage before coughing up a pile of sour-smelling vomit and dying, despite his best efforts. The deluge had finally slowed to a trickle, which would have been a relief if not for the ever-present stench of burning bodies that blanketed Darktown as the corpses were disposed of, the odor so thick and oppressive that it drowned out even the chokedamp.

Still, he’d tied a handkerchief over his nose and mouth every day and gone to the fires, to help, of course, but as he lifted the limp bodies and tossed them into the flames, he couldn’t stop scanning the piles of dead for a lithe, lyrium-etched frame, the dull burnish of spirit hide armor, a gleaming head of white hair. The news from Lirene had been that the mysterious illness – a poison? Magic? A Qunari plot? No one knew for certain – had been confined to a small district of Lowtown, albeit a densely populated one. If Fenris had been in Hightown the night it started, he was likely unaware of the sickness at all. And yet Anders still looked, if only to quiet his own mind. 

But his mind would not be quiet. He would stumble back to the clinic to scrub the ash and stink from himself before falling onto his cot, expecting sleep to pull him under like a strong river current. Instead, he floundered, dreams of Fenris tormenting him until he awoke a few hours later to find himself tangled in sheets wet with sweat and come. 

They had fallen into a pattern, he and Fenris, almost like a dance, of coming together and then spinning away from each other, but in the past – after he’d started caring – he had always been sure that eventually, somehow, Fenris would turn up at the clinic bleeding or that his own desire for companionship would overcome his pride and Justice’s disapproval and he would climb up to Hightown under the pretense of visiting Fenris’s cats. Even as he’d trudged back from the Wounded Coast the morning Fenris had killed Hadriana, he’d expected the elf to be waiting around the next curve in the road, leaning against the next cluster of rocks in that cat-like combination of tension and laziness he had. But the road back to Kirkwall remained empty, aside from the odd corpse, and the rest of Anders’s life had followed suit. Something had snapped between them, recoiled – Anders felt as if a templar had used Silence on him, cutting him off from his magic. That, at least, was temporary, if terrifying, but he did not have that guarantee with Fenris, and life had become similarly colorless, drab as the filthy water of the bay. 

If Justice had been trying to eliminate any distractions by alienating Fenris – Anders still wasn’t sure of the words they’d exchanged in the slavers’ caves that had so infuriated the elf – it had backfired spectacularly. Not that he could blame Justice. The friend he’d known had been kind, if inflexible in his morality – this was all Anders’s own influence, the pettiness, the jealousy. If Justice was now a demon, as Fenris had been fond of saying, he was a demon made in Anders’s image. So Anders dragged himself through his days, one eye on the clinic door in case Fenris walked through it, and he writhed through his nights, his own groans waking him, the taste of Fenris bitter-green on his tongue. When he tried to work on his manifesto, his train of thought knotted itself, and he’d sit for an hour staring at the empty page before him, trying to unravel his ideas about magic and the Maker. 

He shoved the ink-spattered pages out of sight and packed up his salves and ointments. Though he felt adrift, disconnected from everything, he still had a routine to follow, and it was his night to treat the whores at the Blooming Rose. Would his feet obey the routine and carry him to the Red Lantern District, or would they follow the now more familiar – and, if he was honest, more desirable – course to Hightown Estates and Fenris? He longed for the old Anders, who would’ve spent coin he didn’t have on wine and a tumble with Madam Lusine’s best employee, and been content enough. While that Anders’s life hadn’t been easier, perhaps, at least his appetites had been much less complicated. 

  
Two hours looking at sores and fluids, listening to laundry lists of symptoms, and doling out salves to whores who offered to let him smear the medicines on in exchange for fifty silver – to which he replied that he didn’t get paid until _after_ they were cured – hadn’t been much of an improvement on agonizing over a mages’ rights screed that no one would ever read, but at least he had a full purse. Or he would, once he found Madam Lusine in the lounge and suffered through their usual haggling, during which she offered him an hour with the companion of his choice instead of paying him. He followed the reedy strains of the lackadaisically plucked lute and peals of forced laughter to the main lounge, and there, amid the other punters at the bar, white hair glowing like the moon in the lurid light, was Fenris. 

Anders stumbled over his own feet as he took in the spiked pauldrons, the long stripe of bare skin down the back of the armor, his stomach churning at the idea of the elf being there for the companions’ services, disappointment and jealousy slipping and sliding over one another in his gut. Fenris had always seemed so disgusted, for obvious reasons, at the idea of flesh being exchanged for coin, however brief the transaction, and if he had just stopped being bloody stubborn and let Anders explain or apologize or somehow ingratiate himself, he could have been getting the services the Blooming Rose offered for free. Well, maybe not _all_ of them. Anders would probably have drawn the line at sucking the toes of someone who went barefoot in Darktown. 

When Anders sidled up to the bar next to him, though, Fenris seemed far more interested in the bottom of his wine goblet than in any of the companions in the lounge. 

“Not the first place in Kirkwall I’d expect to find you,” Anders said, taking the stool next to Fenris’s. “Did the Viscount institute a public brooding tax that forced you indoors?” 

He thought he saw the tiniest hint of an upward curl at the corner of Fenris’s lips, but when the elf spoke, his voice was that surly combination of boredom and flatness that Anders realized he had missed almost as much as he’d missed Fenris’s mouth or the touch of his hands. _Andraste’s basket-maker, you’re wetter than if you’d been dragged across the Amaranthine Ocean behind a boat_ , he thought. 

“My wine cellar was empty. This is the only place in this blighted city to get palatable wine.” The gold wedges of light in his eyes flashed in Anders’s direction as he glanced at him. “And I am not brooding. I was perfectly content before you arrived.” 

“I hope it wasn’t… post-coital contentment. Luckily, I have my salves right here, if you need them. It was a particularly busy night for me.” 

Fenris’s smile quickly twisted into a sneer, and he turned back into full profile, presenting Anders with a view of shining white hair, a sliver of cheekbone, and the barest tips of dark eyelashes. “Disgusting. I would not pay for _that_.” 

“No, of course not. You’re just here for the wine.” 

Fenris plunked his empty goblet down on the bar and stood. “Yes. And now that the wine is gone, I will be taking my leave.” 

“I could buy you another,” Anders blurted, quashing the bass nagging of Justice in his head that all the coin was meant for the clinic. He snatched the soon-to-be-full purse from his belt and jiggled it in Fenris’s face, as if the clinking of the coppers still left in it would convince him. Fenris glared at him and brushed his hand away with an exasperated sweep of his arm. “Please? I… I’ve been hoping to see you – I thought you might be sick or dead or something – but now you’re here, and I’d like to explain? Or apologize or… I don’t know what happened in the caves exactly, but whatever it was, I regret it.” 

He was babbling, and somewhere amid all of that prattle, he’d hooked his finger into one of Fenris’s vambraces, as if he could tether him in place with that. And worse, his electricity trick was sparking in his fingertips, ready to tickle up Fenris’s arm. Anders snatched his hand away, glancing guiltily away from the eyebrow Fenris raised at him. 

“Perhaps Madam Lusine would let us use a room – not for that!” he said quickly, when Fenris’s eyebrow quirked up even higher, and the sneer made a return visit. “Just so we can speak privately. On neutral ground. With no cats to distract me.” 

“Is your demon going to lecture me again about how killing a slaver, a murderer, a blood mage is unjust?” Fenris asked, crossing his arms over his chest. 

Justice grumbled an almost petulant _It is unjust of him to name me demon!_ in the back of his head, but Anders ignored him and said, “No! Is that what he…? I mean, hopefully not. I can’t always con—” He cut himself off before he could finish the word, but the damage had been done – Fenris was giving him an insufferably smug look. “I’ll do my best to keep the lecturing to a minimum.” 

Even that weak assurance must have been enough for Fenris, because he followed Anders as he wove through the crowded lounge to where Madam Lusine was speaking to a blushing blond templar, or trying to – the fellow was stammering so much he could barely get a word out. He looked fresh from the country, so she was probably trying to convince him that her two-sovereign whores were substantially better than the fifty-silver ones, even though Anders knew that she rotated her companions on a schedule, so what cost two sovereigns today would be fifty silver next week and one sovereign the week after that. 

“Madam Lusine, would you happen to have a room I could use for a while?” She arched an eyebrow at him, bird-of-prey eyes cool over her brightly rouged cheeks. “You could take it out of my pay for this week,” he offered. 

“That’s not one of mine,” she said, eying Fenris up and down. He fidgeted under her stare, his habitual politeness barely masking his disgust even as he flicked invisible lint from his armor, as if trying to ensure that it was spotless. Anders wanted to grab him by his spiky shoulders and shout, “You don’t have to do that anymore! You’re a free man!”, but he doubted Fenris would have appreciated the spectacle or the reminder that he still clung to many of the habits he’d developed as a slave. 

“I know, Madam Lusine, but he _is_ a patron, and…” Anders began, but she spoke over him, addressing Fenris this time, “He’s not one of mine.” 

“If he were, I would say that your establishment’s fine reputation had been grossly misleading,” Fenris replied, giving her a formal bow. 

“I beg your pardon?” Anders protested. 

Madam Lusine sniffed, a little huff of air that seemed almost amused. “You can have the storeroom off the kitchen for an hour for a sovereign,” she said in her nasal voice that had had Lowtown poorly scrubbed out of it. “Try not to make a mess this time. And you, Messere Elf, if you ever need work, my door will always be open.” 

“ _Venhedis _,” Fenris muttered, and Anders nudged him in the direction of the kitchens before he could upbraid Madam Lusine on the evils of selling flesh, slavery or no. The elven workers arguing over stolen perfume in the kitchen didn’t give them a second glance as they went into the dim, cramped storeroom, Anders shutting the door after them. He rested his forehead against the doorjamb, staring at the line of golden light creeping between it and the door, and tried to order his thoughts before speaking, which was all but impossible with Fenris behind him, the clean smell of him – him and the lyrium – managing to swallow up the odor of cured meat, red wine gone to vinegar, and the cheap incense that Madam Lusine claimed was an aphrodisiac.__

__“She might give you some of your money back if we’re done in less than an hour,” Fenris said, his voice closer than Anders had expected. “Speak, mage.”_ _

__He turned, leaning back against the door, one hand on the handle as if to give him a quick escape. From what, he couldn’t say. He didn’t fear Fenris – maybe he had once but no more. Perhaps it was Justice he feared, or – which suddenly seemed most likely – perhaps he feared Fenris’s reaction most, cold disinterest, contempt, anything other than what he’d seen in the elf’s face the last night they’d spent at his mansion, when Anders had stumbled out of a light sleep and watched from under half-closed eyelids as Fenris had stared at Anders’s feet, then slowly lifted his eyes to gaze at his face. Fondness? Tenderness? Something that lacked the visceral intensity of desire and yet somehow encompassed it. To look at Fenris now and see only indifference on his face would have been worth fleeing._ _

__“I don’t remember what Justice said to you. But if he disagreed with your killing Hadriana, he and I are both hypocrites.”_ _

__“You could have saved my time and your coin, mage, if that’s all you wanted to tell me,” Fenris said, the chill in his voice making the hairs on Anders’s arms stand up. “I was already aware.”_ _

__Anders sighed. “I’m sure I deserve that,” he said, but annoyance still pricked him when Fenris nodded. “But I made a similar choice once, when I was in the Grey Wardens.” Fenris settled back against a stack of crates as if giving Anders permission to continue his story, arms still folded across his chest, vambraces a sharp barrier, legs crossed at the ankle. “He – Rolan – was another Grey Warden, so I should have felt bound by my oaths not to strike him down.”_ _

__He swallowed, remembering the warmth that had spread through him at taste of Rolan’s blood on his tongue, how the former templar’s scream of terror and pain had been sweeter than the song of the Fade to Justice. “He was a templar who had joined the Wardens to watch me. After Justice and I merged, he found out and told the others, who agreed that I was an abomination and should be… taken care of.” His fingers brushed the feathers over his heart, combing through them gently, reminding himself again of the old scar Rolan’s sword had left when he had buried it hilt-deep in Anders’s chest._ _

__“We killed them all. For their betrayal and for our cause.” He gave a choked yelp of laughter. “Or that’s what we told ourselves to pretend it wasn’t just a selfish act. What I mean to say is that I know why you killed Hadriana – word or not – and even if it was for you, it also saved many other slaves from her.”_ _

__“I didn’t need your permission or your approval,” Fenris said, the flatness of his silhouette in the darkness making his voice even more expressionless to Anders’s ears._ _

__“Maker’s knackers, Fenris, that’s not what I meant! I was trying to apologize for whatever it was Justice said that made you consign me to the bloody Void and then storm off in a huff and disappear for weeks!”_ _

__“I needed to be alone,” Fenris replied, and the simplicity of it struck Anders, the sheer obviousness – how they could mirror one another so closely, and yet a mirror image was always reversed. Anders needed an audience for his anger or his grief – whether it was Karl in the Tower in Ferelden when they were boys or the hypothetical readers of his manifesto, he required a witness to his suffering, sympathetic or not. Fenris, on the other hand, repelled such attention, shunning even well-intentioned sympathy, even just commiseration. “You know where I live.”_ _

__“The only bottles I like having thrown at my head are Agreggio Pavali, and I knew you were out of that,” Anders said, trying to smirk. He _could’ve_ gone to Fenris’s mansion to check on him – he _should_ have – but he’d felt wronged, blamed. “Look, I’m sorry if I made you feel as though getting your revenge on Hadriana was somehow unimportant – I never thought that. Vengeance is something I understand _very_ well.” _ _

__Fenris was staring at him, thoughtfully rubbing his lower lip with the shiny steel of one of his fingerguards. _I’ve never envied a piece of metal before_ , Anders thought, but then carefully folded the thought away. Now wasn’t the time for that. _ _

__“Perhaps I took my anger out on you, undeservedly so,” Fenris said. “I was… not myself, which I’m sure you also understand very well.”_ _

__Anders laughed softly, stepping closer to Fenris, close enough to see the slight hint of a smile on his lips through the dimness. He was glad that he had, because that smile faded all too soon, and Fenris turned away, his voice becoming halting, careful, as if he was deciding as he went what to tell Anders and what to hold back._ _

__“When I was a slave, Hadriana was a torment. She would ridicule me, deny my meals, hound my sleep, all under the guise of training me, toughening me up to be a proper bodyguard. But I knew it was jealousy – I was Danarius’s precious pet, after all, and she was just his lackey.” He looked up at Anders, the golden shards of light in his eyes flashing as his gaze fixed itself on Anders’s face. “I did not want to be his pet, you understand. I would gladly have changed places with Hadriana, if given the chance.”_ _

__The stench of damp filled Anders’s noise, moss, lichen, stagnant water, and he shivered as Fenris’s description of his own life brought back the year in solitary confinement in the tower at Kinloch Hold, the gnawing hunger, the nights of being shaken from sleep by his bored or vindictive templar guards to be beaten. The scars on his back, numbed by time, throbbed with pain, as if he were being shot by a volley of arrows. With a shaking hand, he wiped his forehead, and his palm came away moist with cold sweat._ _

__“Because of her status, I was powerless to respond, and she knew it,” Fenris continued, his voice tightening with contempt until it was as sharp and piercing as an awl. “The thought of her slipping out of my grasp now… I couldn’t let her go. I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”_ _

__“You _wanted_ to let her go?” Anders asked. “After all that?” He gave his head a disbelieving shake. “You are a more forgiving man than I am, Fenris.” _ _

__Fenris spread his hands, two silver stars glinting in the low light, and Anders wanted to take them in his, trace the lyrium in their palms with his fingertips, but instead he crossed his arms, trapping his hands beneath them, and watched as Fenris tightened his gauntleted hands slowly into fists. “I should be happy now that Hadriana is dead. Instead, I feel nothing but… disquiet. This hate – I thought I’d gotten away from it. But it dogs me no matter where I go. To feel it again, to know it was they who planted it inside me… it was too much to bear.”_ _

__His head had sunk lower as he spoke, until his face was hidden by the fall of his fine white hair, the silvery threads running through it glistening the dim light. Anders reached out, cupped Fenris’s face in his hands. Fenris looked up, meeting his eyes unwillingly, and Anders could see the tendrils of softer green radiating from the black of his dilated pupils to the dark ring around his wide irises before Fenris lowered his eyes again, shading the gold-shot green behind thick, black eyelashes._ _

__“Use that hate as a weapon against them, Fenris! Make them regret ever having given it to you. Let it be like food to you,” he said, leaning his forehead against Fenris’s._ _

__“But I don’t want it inside me anymore,” Fenris murmured. There was a sense of humidity in his voice, so different from its usual dryness. “It eats at me. It’s what I imagine being tainted by the Blight must be like, wasting away, being consumed by it. I could contain it before and let it drive me, but after Hadriana, there is only this hollowness.”_ _

__Anders swallowed hard, forcing down the sour taste that burned on this tongue, and buried his face in Fenris’s hair, planting a row of kisses along his hairline as he inhaled the clean scent of it – no rancid oily smell like the one he knew his hair had when Justice and his patients kept him too busy to sleep much less bathe properly, just an odor like freshly crushed herbs. Fenris tensed, his cheeks going taut against Anders’s palms as he clenched his jaw, but then after a moment, he gave a resigned sigh and stepped closer to Anders, like a child dutifully putting its face up to be kissed by a doddering old relative. Anders ran the pads of his thumbs along the crests of Fenris’s cheekbones once and then stepped back, dropping his arms to his sides._ _

__“That’s not what I want, Fenris. Or at least not _all_ I want.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done what I did the other night, but I wanted to give you something, and Maker knows I have nothing else to offer.” _ _

__“I cannot tell if you are fishing for compliments or if you are a fool,” Fenris said. His voice was rich and dark, but warm and thick with a heady sweetness, like strongly brewed tea with sugar in it, and suddenly very close. A gauntleted hand, the chime of lyrium tolling softly from its palm, gently clasped his wrist and took his hand away from his face. Anders opened his eyes to find Fenris holding his wrist up as if they were about to do one of those mincing Orlesian dances, regarding it thoughtfully. But instead of leading him into a waltz, Fenris pressed his lips against the pulse-point in his wrist, nudging his cheek into Anders’s open palm._ _

__Anders’s breath caught in his throat, and his knees quaked beneath him. He crooked his fingers to cradle Fenris’s cheek, and his fingertip brushed the elongated lobe of Fenris’s ear. Fenris groaned against the skin of his wrist – it sounded drawn from somewhere deep inside and unfurled a warm ribbon of breath over Anders’s palm. That noise, in which need, desperation, and desire were braided together, seemed to coil around Anders’s wrist, tying them together as surely as a rope. At that moment, if given the choice between freedom for mages and hearing Fenris make that sound again, Anders would have had a momentary struggle with himself… and Justice. He skimmed his finger along Fenris’s earlobe again – it was softer than the finest Antivan silk, faintly downy like the skin of a ripe apricot – and was rewarded with another moan from Fenris, this one lower, shuddering, almost _too_ intimate. _ _

__Fenris looked up at him, eyes dark, dazed, ticking back and forth over Anders’s face as if he weren’t really seeing it and was seeking it in the dimness. His fingers didn’t seem to share his confusion, though, as they tightened around Anders’s wrist and yanked him forward. Their lips met, Fenris’s mouth hot and open, tongue pushing against his, insistent and eager, and the world seemed to compress and collapse around that nexus point of their lips, their shared breath. Anders felt like he was standing on a great height, the same giddy thrill of altitude coupled with the knowledge that a foot placed wrong would lead to a precarious plunge. His head whirled, as if the press of Fenris’s mouth were the only thing keeping it anchored safely to his body, and a jolt of electricity hit him low in the belly, crackling through his limbs and spreading heat to his groin._ _

__As if he could see into Anders’s thoughts, Fenris slung his arms around him, pulling Anders closer, one hand slipping down his back and resting in the small of it. He brushed a gauntleted thumb back and forth over it, as if he were strumming a lute, and chills climbed Anders’s spine, goosebumps pricking up along his arms and thighs._ _

__Anders broke the kiss, unwillingly though he was suddenly desperate for breath, his heart feeling as if it were lodged in his throat. With a huff of disappointment, Fenris immediately focused his attention on Anders’s neck, tongue wallowing briefly in the well between his clavicles before following the thin lines of muscle up his throat to his jaw. Anders panted helplessly into the musty air of the storeroom – he felt overwhelmed, to have gone without touching or being touched by Fenris for weeks and then this, this superfluity of sensation that he greedily wanted to consume every bit of, even though he knew that doing so would make the next period of doing without even harder. He wanted to believe that maybe this time there would be no drought between floods, but he knew too well Fenris’s willingness to perceive slights where there were none and his own propensity to say things that could easily be perceived as slights._ _

__“Mage,” Fenris said, his voice a low hum against Anders’s neck._ _

__“Hm?” Anders glanced down, but Fenris’s face was still buried against his throat – all he could see was the spider’s silk white of his hair and the tawny point of an ear. He dipped his head a bit, just enough to run his lips over Fenris’s earlobe, smiling as the elf shuddered, bucking his hips against Anders’s._ _

__When he spoke again, Fenris’s words were halting, whether from arousal or nervousness, Anders couldn’t tell. “When you said that I sing to you, what did you mean?”_ _

__Anders jerked with surprise – had he said that? When? – feeling his body tense in Fenris’s arms, even as his cock went soft. He tried to make his voice light, to leaven it with a laugh that sounded forced. “Did I say that? I must not have been thinking straight… all my blood was probably in places other than my head.”_ _

__His knees almost buckled in relief when he felt Fenris’s lips curve against his throat. Bile burned at the back of his tongue – the singing sounded far too much like Justice when he’d talked about his lyrium ring and its beautiful song, and it wouldn’t have been the first time that Fenris’s lyrium tattoos had drawn the spirit’s attention. Before, Justice had seemed to lose interest once the kissing had begun, retreating into confusion that bordered on distaste, making Anders all too willing to disregard the possibility. He swallowed hard and almost gagged._ _

__What if it was _all_ Justice and had been all along? He personally had no reason to be particularly attracted to Fenris – Fenris’s obvious physical beauty aside – much less to care for him. It made no sense, and yet… he did. Unless it was Justice, grasping for the lyrium in the elf’s markings, _making_ him care the way he’d worked on Anders to make him sympathetic to the plight of mages. The spirit’s usual complaints about distractions seemed to have grown more feeble, but Anders had put that down to the fact that weeks could go by without seeing Fenris, weeks in which Anders threw himself into the clinic and the work of the mage underground to keep himself occupied. Did _nothing_ belong to him anymore? Not his own thoughts, not his own dreams, not even his own desires. And he couldn’t – wouldn’t – do that to Fenris; Anders knew what it was like to be grown out of, to be used, however sincerely and kindly, until one was no longer needed and then left behind. _ _

__“Madam Lusine will be banging on the door, demanding another sovereign if we don’t get out of here,” he said, trying to extricate himself from Fenris’s embrace. The elf gave him another squeeze, tongue darting along his jawline, but then he reluctantly untwined his arms from around Anders and stepped back._ _

__“You should come by the clinic some day, though,” Anders said, staring down at the pale lines of lyrium that curved over Fenris’s toes. “We can talk about… the next step, whatever you want that to be.” He glanced up to find Fenris arching an eyebrow at him again, head turned slightly to one side to look askance at Anders – it was the elf’s favorite way of asking a question without having to bother with how to phrase it. “About your sister,” Anders explained. “If you wanted to pursue that, or….”_ _

__“Ah.” Fenris’s brows furrowed, a crescent of shadow appearing between them, and he looked away as if guilty that he hadn’t been dwelling on the idea constantly. Anders had never seen someone get the wilts as quickly and comprehensively, judging by the slouch of Fenris’s shoulders, the hint of a buckle at his knees. “Yes, of course. I will need your assistance, I suppose. Thank you.” Fenris recovered himself, straightening to the fine posture that must have been required when he was a magister’s bodyguard, and gave Anders a slight bow. “I should… go. Good night.”_ _

__He brushed past Anders, close enough to make the hairs on Anders’s arms rise, close enough for both him and Justice to hear the soft knell of the lyrium with their shared ears. Anders bit down on his lower lip, eyes stinging, and choked out a feeble “’Night” before the door slammed shut behind Fenris. Alone – or as alone as he could ever be – Anders let out a shaking breath and wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands, trying to compose himself in case Madam Lusine was lurking outside the door for her extra coin._ _

__

__****************_ _

__

The walk back to Darktown took longer than it should have, the heaviness in his steps slowing him, as did pausing every few yards to struggle with the urge to climb the long, meandering staircase back up to Hightown and Fenris. The clinic was empty when he arrived – he’d learned not to expect Fenris anymore, but his hope seemed to be like the torches in the sewers: always burning in spite of a lack of necessity or fuel – and disappointment hit him like a punch to the sternum, so palpable that he pressed his hand to his chest, healing magic sparking futilely in his fingertips. He emptied the pouch of Madam Lusine’s coin into the locked donation box, hearing the hollow plunks of metal on wood that made it clear nothing else was inside, and glanced at his makeshift desk, the papers he’d abandoned earlier in the evening, with a sigh. In the morning, the work would continue, as it had before Fenris, as it had after Karl, as it always would as long as he was sharing a body with Justice.

Allure of the lyrium markings aside, Anders doubted that Justice would abandon their work on the cause of mages’ rights in favor of making him seek Fenris out. Demons were opportunistic, so perhaps spirits of virtue could be too, albeit in a more passive way, and he supposed it was possible that Justice had just been enjoying the benefits of being near Fenris without actively throwing Anders in Fenris’s way. But their wills had become so intertwined, how could Anders be certain? And maybe it wouldn’t have even mattered, as long as Anders knew he was the one who had made the first choice, who had thrown that line to Fenris and towed him in. If he could have remembered the moment when _he_ had decided. 

But he knew that was rarely how it worked. With Karl, it had been easy – Karl had persevered when the other apprentices had given up on the strange, rebellious boy with the Ander blood, and Anders had responded with devotion that he now found somewhat embarrassing. But Fenris? Since when had death threats become arousing? When had he ever considered being called an abomination a term of endearment? 

Anders went into the back room, shucking off his coat and sitting on the camp bed, head in hands. _You told me once that a demon is a spirit who has been perverted by its desires_ , he thought, the words reaching out tentatively as roots through soil for Justice. _You insisted that you had none then, but do you now?_

Silence, heavy and dense as fog rolling off the bay. Had their union become so complete that, if Justice _did_ have desires, they were indistinguishable from Anders’s own? If that were the case, if Justice _were_ gone and all that remained was what the two of them had formed, why did snatches of time go missing from Anders’s memory, always coinciding with those threads of black smoke rising from his skin, which he knew heralded Justice’s appearance? In spite of everything, the thought of Justice being truly gone made loneliness press down more heavily upon him, like a boot crushing a beetle. 

_My desires, if I have them, are more abstract. You should know this. I have given them to you._

Anders straightened with a jerk, staring around himself in the darkness as if Justice were in the room with him. _And Fenris?_ Silence again was the only response, though now it seemed to Anders a slightly confused silence. 

_He was helpful with rescuing the apprentices from slavers_ , Justice replied hesitantly, _but I question his dedication to the cause of mages’ rights._

“That’s the understatement of the age,” Anders said to the empty room, letting out a gulp of laughter. “But his lyrium tattoos? Do they… call to you? Are you drawn to them?” 

_They make a beautiful song. It is pleasant to hear when he is nearby_. Hardly the enthusiasm that Anders had been expecting, and he could again sense the spirit’s confusion. He scrubbed his hand over his face with a sigh. What had he wanted to hear? Did he want to be able to shift the blame for his baffling attraction to Fenris or was he simply looking for an explanation for it? 

He lay back on the camp bed and stared up into the shadows that hung in the rafters like cobwebs. Sleep had been a far more elusive companion than Justice lately – almost as elusive as Fenris, in fact, and Fenris was often the reason for his wakefulness – and that night was no different. And when sleep finally overtook him, the Fade held no answers.


	16. Chapter 16

The next morning dawned hot and humid, the air like a sponge soaked in bilgewater that needed wringing out. The chokedamp seemed to bind itself to the humidity and was thicker than usual, settling in stagnant pools of sickly green vapor rather than burning off, and the stench of sewers and bodies was near unbearable. Anders doubted that Fenris would turn up – for all of the elf’s hardships in his former life, he was somewhat finicky, always complaining about the smell of fish when they were down by the docks, nose wrinkling at every mildly unpleasant odor in the clinic, which meant that his nose was scrunched up in disgust most of the time. Luckily, it let Anders pretend that sometimes the look of disgust wasn’t directed at him or any other mages. Didn’t slaves have to deal with their master’s chamberpots and their dirty smallclothes? Though it seemed that Fenris hadn’t been just any slave, and had been petted and cosseted by Danarius, if not by that Hadriana woman.

The heat must have sapped even the refugees’ energy for getting injured, because the clinic was almost deserted, just a few Fereldan women lackadaisically sorting potion ingredients and rolling bandages, and even they melted away before the hidden sun hit its peak. Anders extinguished the lamp after the last of them had wandered off into the sweltering corridors of Darktown, planning on peeling off as much of his sweat-soaked clothing as possible and trying to cast Winter’s Grasp on his cot to see if that brought any relief. 

“Mage!” 

Anders glanced up from watching his own boots dragging through the dirt to find Fenris slipping out of one of the tunnels that led to the basement of a Hightown estate. The elf wore his usual light armor, and if he was sweating, it showed up as more of a sheen on his skin than as fat drops clinging to his hairline and upper lip like it did on Anders. Bloody elves. 

“Fenris, I wasn’t expecting you… I mean, come in, if you can stand it,” he said, trying to surreptitiously dab the sweat off his face with his sleeve. 

“You did say to come by,” Fenris replied as he followed Anders toward the backroom. “Are you all right? If you are otherwise engaged, I could go.” 

Anders shrugged off his coat and dropped it on his cot. “No, it’s fine. I’m just a little, uh, warm.” He sat down and tugged off his boots. “I thought you’d rather be in Hightown, drinking chilled wine and enjoying the cool breezes with all the toffs.” 

“White wines are meant to be drunk chilled, and those all turned to vinegar in the wine cellar long ago,” Fenris said, adopting that stiff and yet somehow testy, almost pedantic tone he used when explaining something. Anders was often equally surprised by the breadth of the elf’s knowledge and Fenris’s seeming belief that such things were widely known. “And my neighbors do not invite me to their parties.” 

Fenris sat down on the stool next to Anders’s cot, and for a moment, Anders stared down at their bare feet, Fenris’s dark silver-limned toes almost touching his white, freckled ones. He could feel Fenris’s eyes on him, his gaze skittering over his arms and face. 

“Are you sure you’re feeling well?” Fenris asked, reaching out to brush some sweat off of Anders’s forehead. Anders had finally schooled himself into not flinching when Fenris reached for him while wearing his gauntlets – Fenris was careful now, with Anders at least, to arch his hand so the steel didn’t scrape, the claws didn’t stab. His breath caught and rattled in his throat at the touch, and he hoped that Fenris hadn’t heard it. 

“Completely sure. And completely well.” He tried to smile, but it slid off his face along with the sweat rolling down his cheeks. 

“I suppose I’m used to the heat from living in Tevinter,” Fenris said with a shrug. The tips of his gauntlets combed through the hair along Anders’s hairline, but then – to Anders’s relief – he dropped his hand back into his lap. “On the subject of the Imperium….” 

“Your sister! Yes, of course,” Anders blurted. “Are you going to write her a letter? You know her employer’s name, so it should be quite easy to—” He trailed off when he saw Fenris staring at him, eyes narrowed, the curl of distaste that had begun when he’d said “Imperium” grown into a full-blown sneer. 

“Do you think they teach slaves to read and write?” he spat. 

“I—I didn’t think of that,” Anders murmured. His face burned even hotter than before, and he bowed his head, wiping some sweat from his cheeks, to hide it. “Of course I could be your scribe for this letter. And then maybe I could teach you….” He got a brief vision of his own hand guiding Fenris’s, helping him to form letters, and shivered, even as he felt his cheeks flushing even hotter. He must have been glowing by now. 

“Is that what this is? Teach the poor slave how to write?” Fenris was gripping his own knees so tightly he must have been drawing blood, and his back was as rigid as the sword strapped to it. 

“As you’re fond of reminding everyone, you’re not a slave anymore,” Anders said. “I’m just trying to help you, you know.” 

Fenris shoved his hand through his hair – miraculously the gauntlet slid through it with no snagging or pulling, and it fell perfectly back into place. Anders caught a glimpse of the three dots of lyrium in the center of his forehead and felt a quiver in his stomach, something between hunger and nausea, maybe a hint of fear. He cocked an ear for Justice’s response, but none came. 

“Ugh, ignore me,” Fenris said, pushing himself up from the stool. He started to pace, a small circuit for his long legs in the cramped room. “You are not responsible for my deficiencies.” 

“Not even responsible by association because I’m a mage?” Anders asked, trying to keep any sting out of his voice, though that was often unnecessary with Fenris, who could read criticism into a compliment. 

Fenris seemed to mull it over for a moment as he paced – at least he was creating a bit of a breeze – and then said, “No. And I do not mean to seem ungrateful. I do appreciate the offer, but right now I need to focus on what to do about Varania.” He stumbled over the name and frowned. “You would think that even if my memory could not recall her, my mouth would remember speaking her name, but it clearly does not.” He paused, staring down at the ground, all the usual kinetic tension in him leached away. “Perhaps that means this is a trap.” 

“What do you mean?” Anders worried at the frayed hem of his shirt, trying to keep his hands busy so he wouldn’t reach out for Fenris. The fabric shredded in his fingers. He supposed he could use a few coppers from the donation box for a new shirt. In the past, all of the coin would have already been spent on clothing and trinkets – and bits of meat for Ser Pounce-a-lot – but now he found that he couldn’t be bothered to care. Beyond the necessities of basic hygiene, as much as he could manage those in Darktown, it just didn’t matter. He wondered if maybe he should have felt more disturbed by the loss of who he’d been or if it were somehow an indication that he’d improved as a person because of Justice’s influence. 

The soft pad of Fenris’s feet on the dirt floor started up again, and when he answered, his voice was sharp and impatient. “Danarius could have sent Hadriana here to tell me about this sister.” 

“As little as I’d like to remind you, Hadriana came to Kirkwall because she heard that someone had been making inquiries about her,” Anders said, but Fenris gave his head a dismissive shake. 

“Even if he didn’t, trying to find her would still be suicide. Danarius has to know about her and has to know that Hadriana knew.” His shoulders slumped, arms dangling limp. “And even if I found my sister, who knows what the magisters have done to her? Look at what they did to me.” He raised his arms, the lyrium gleaming with the soft light of the Fade, before letting them fall back to his sides. 

“But what good would it do Hadriana to use a sister who couldn’t remember you as a bargaining chip?” Anders asked. As if summoned by the brief flicker of Fenris’s markings, Justice stirred, and Anders’s stomach dropped. The spirit had denied any interest in Fenris, and yet he appeared every time Fenris was nearby, like Pounce had done when Anders had eaten fish for dinner. Justice would have been rubbing his chin against Fenris’s toes if he’d had a corporeal form. And been a cat. Anders sighed, scratching the back of his head, fingertips sliding in the sweat on his scalp. “Two siblings with no memory of each other would just be strangers, wouldn’t they? I know Hadriana was opportunistic, but was she also stupid?” 

“The magisters can do more than erase your memory, mage. You should know that,” Fenris said, the words sounding forced through gritted teeth. 

“But Hadriana said your sister wasn’t a slave. I know things are different in the Imperium – you’ve reminded me often enough – but would Danarius be able to prey on a free woman? Especially one who worked for another magister?” 

Fenris sank back down onto the stool and buried his face in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice muffled. “I feel like such a fool. I… I should feel something _more_ about this knowledge, shouldn’t I? Something other than distrust and skepticism and anger.” He dropped his hands and looked up at Anders as if begging for direction, his eyes like ponds reflecting a forest canopy above, ponds deep enough for Anders to sink in. 

“You feel what you feel,” Anders said. The words were useless as tits on a simir bird, so useless that he was annoyed by them on Fenris’s behalf. He always felt, though he would have denied it, like he had very little control of his own emotions, like he was mastered by them – after all, he’d managed to taint a spirit of Justice with the strength of his anger – and yet he had nothing to offer Fenris. He took a deep breath and tried again. “You don’t remember having a sister. Just being told that you do won’t automatically fill in all the missing memories of what your sister meant to you, if she meant anything. Maybe you hated each other? Maybe she worked for another magister before you got your markings and you rarely saw her?” 

“Do you have any siblings?” Fenris asked. He sounded hesitant, and he gave Anders a careful, sidelong look, as if he feared he was prying, but Anders just shrugged. 

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I didn’t. But perhaps my parents had a child to replace me after I was dragged off to the Circle.” His voice was cold to his ears, almost enough to bring a chill to the sweltering room. 

Fenris winced, and Anders noticed that he was brushing the markings on his palm with the pad of his thumb, as if he were trying to remind himself of how he’d gotten them or as if the pain of touching them somehow brought him comfort. “I apologize. I didn’t know.” 

“It’s all right. I don’t think of them very much,” he said, one hand straying toward the pillow that he rested his head on every night, wishing that it would bring dreams of his mother that didn’t involve her sobbing as he was taken away in handcuffs by the templars. Dreams that didn’t include his father with his arm around his mother’s shoulders, guiding her away from the spectacle their son had made, their son the embarrassment, the danger. 

“I brought you something,” Fenris said. He took a folded-up piece of fabric from his belt pouch and laid it on his thigh – Anders recognized the material as the red and gold of the blanket on Fenris’s bed. 

“Really? What is it? A delicious carpet mushroom from your entry hall?” 

Fenris gave him an infinitesimal smirk, so small that Anders might not have seen it if he hadn’t dedicated weeks, if not months, to detecting the tiniest smile – or what passed for one – on Fenris’s face. He carefully unfolded the fabric, revealing a pile of feathers inside. Anders leaned over to look, slowly, so as not to send them all flying around the room like snowflakes in a blizzard. 

“Meowedith has been killing birds in the courtyard,” Fenris explained, and Anders grinned at the elf’s use of the name that he had given the cat. “I noticed the feathers on your coat were looking a bit ragged, so I gathered them and cleaned them for you.” 

“My fingers are more used to stitching up skin than sewing on feathers, but I’ll try to do them justice.” He looked up at Fenris and saw the pale triangle of his own face reflected in the elf’s eyes, bright against Fenris’s dilated pupils. 

“I could do it,” Fenris offered, hesitant again, looking at him with wide, expectant eyes like a puppy resting its head on its master’s knee, hoping for a pat. “One of the many skills I learned as a household slave, and one of the more useful.” He reached up and brushed the back of his gauntlet against Anders’s bare shoulder and down his upper arm – instead of scratching his skin, the touch felt like the faintest graze of fingernails. “Just show me where you’d like them,” he said, his eyes following the movement of his own hand, as if Anders were wearing his coat and he were picturing where each feather should go. 

When his hand reached Anders’s elbow, he flipped it over and ran it back up to Anders’s shoulder, this time touching the skin with his bare palm, his fingertips making tiny eddies around the freckles. Anders let out a shuddering breath, a flush of arousal running through him that was followed quickly by the queasiness he’d felt before. 

“In exchange for my scribe services,” he said, trying to smile, though he was sure it was a faltering, tilted thing, as sickly as he felt. He ran his fingertip over a glossy black feather and watched the sheen of it shift between green and purple in the dim light. “They’re beautiful. Thank you, Fenris.” 

“I always thought it strange that you should be so partial to cats,” Fenris said. He sounded odd, distracted, as if he were talking about the weather, exchanging mindless pleasantries with an acquaintance while his mind was elsewhere, though Anders doubted if Fenris had ever spoken a word of polite small talk in his life. 

“Why?” Anders asked, shivering as the sharp tips of Fenris’s fingerguards skipped over his shoulder and up to his neck, running along the line of his jaw. He swallowed hard, though he knew that doing so brought the skin of his throat dangerously close to the points of Fenris’s gauntlets. 

“You’re so much like a bird,” Fenris replied. His cheeks flushed, the red racing all the way to the tips of his ears, and his hand fell away from Anders’s throat to rub the back of his own neck. 

Anders laughed, a noise as skittish as a hummingbird on a silk thread leash. “Am I?” 

“It’s the feathers,” Fenris said, gesturing toward Anders’s coat tossed over the foot of the camp bed. “And the constant squawking at all hours, of course.” 

“Of course.” 

Fenris licked his lips, then bit down on the lower one, raking it with his teeth. The blush still lingered high on his cheekbones, and it seemed to Anders that he was arguing with himself over whether he should continue. After a moment, Fenris gave a small shrug, and he said, “And the love of freedom. When you talk about your time in the Circle, I always imagine a bird in a cage, battering itself against the bars without any care for its own safety.” He glanced up at Anders, a quick, shy caress with his eyes, and then looked back down at the pile of feathers on his thigh. “It made more sense in my head.” 

“In that case, I guess I’m always attracted to things that might kill me,” Anders replied, knowing that he was giving Fenris that flirtatious smirk he’d used so many times in the past – on mages, templars, whores – and hated himself for doing it. Especially when Fenris, the tiniest volute of a smile curling one side of his lips, leaned toward him and pressed his mouth against Anders’s. 

Anders froze, torn between desire for Fenris and the uncertainty that that desire might not be his at all. As if sensing his discomfort, Fenris made no move to deepen the kiss, but instead rested his palm over Anders’s heart, the claws of his gauntlets cool through the linen of his shirt. He could feel the warmth of Fenris’s skin seeping into his own, and with it the hum of the lyrium, so close… if he just clasped his hand over Fenris’s and pushed, maybe the lyrium would brand his flesh as well, and he could carry that clarion song with him…. 

Anders jerked away from Fenris with a start, almost toppling over backward on the cot. “I’m sorry… I thought I heard someone knocking at the clinic door,” he stammered. “Did you hear it?” 

Fenris gave him a bewildered look from under furrowed black brows. The tips of his ears were red again. “I heard nothing,” he said, each word clipped precisely, and he busied himself with refolding the feathers into the scrap of fabric. 

Then, as if sent by the Maker himself, there _was_ a knock, the splintering wood and rusted hinges of the front door rattling like a consumptive’s chest. 

“There!” Anders cried, bolting to his feet and grabbing his coat. “That’s definitely a knock. I should go see who it is. This weather is always hard on people in Darktown, especially the ones who aren’t used to it yet. Summer sickness, fevers, dehydration, heatstroke, sunstroke. All sorts of nasty things.” He realized he was babbling and snapped his mouth shut, busying himself with sliding his arms into the sleeves of his coat. 

“Yes.” A short sword thrust of a word. 

Another knock, and Justice began to mutter about _duty_ and _obligation_. At least Anders could be sure that the spirit’s possible interest in Fenris didn’t outweigh his interest in nagging. A sullen look clouded over Fenris’s features as Anders headed toward the main room of the clinic. 

“I’m sure I’ll just be a moment,” he said, pushing the storeroom door open. “I can’t just ignore someone who needs me.” 

Anders had often wondered why Fenris’s eyebrows were black while his hair was white, and he was beginning to think Fenris had planned it that way out of sheer spite, to make all his skeptical brow raises as cutting as possible. One of those dark brows was arched almost to his hairline now. What did the elf want from him? He seemed determined to think of everything as a rejection. But wasn’t he like that about everything? Something was either one thing or another, with no room for nuance or context. Perhaps that’s the way it had to be for slaves to live within such rigid confines – decisions had to be made quickly, situations and people sorted into good or bad as soon as possible. Though the Circle wasn’t much less restrictive, Anders thought, and he’d managed to avoid being so narrow-minded. 

“It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve ignored a knock,” Fenris muttered. 

“What?” 

“Never mind. Go on, don’t let me _distract_ you,” Fenris said, the sarcasm acrid in his voice. Anders shook his head, half in confusion, half in disbelief, and left the room. The word “distract” seemed to tread on his heels as he walked across the empty clinic. What had Fenris meant by it? Justice had complained that Fenris was a distraction before, but Anders had never told the elf about Justice’s objections, much less called him a distraction to his face. 

When he swung open the front door of the clinic, a Fereldan woman was waiting outside, one fist raised as if to knock again. A filthy, listless little boy was balanced on her hip, his head on her shoulder, too weak to even cling to his mother. The woman seemed to melt with relief when he opened the door, the child sliding from her hip, and Anders scooped him into his arms. The boy burned with fever, but he burrowed against Anders’s coat, shivering as if cold. 

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Anders said over his shoulder as he took the child to the nearest cot. “How long has he been like this?” 

“About a week, Messere,” the woman replied, wringing her soiled apron in her hands. “It got worse today, though. Couldn’t stop complaining about being too hot and then being too cold.” 

_Sounds familiar, blowing hot and cold_ , Anders thought, glancing toward the storeroom. He gave the woman a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry. He’ll be back to his usual self in no time,” he said. Usually, he would have given the child a potion, herbs to lower the fever, clean water, a safe place to rest for a few hours, but knowing Fenris was waiting in the storeroom made him choose expedience over his own tiredness. As he cast his healing spell over the supine child, he decided that he needed to tell Fenris of his concerns about Justice. Fenris would jump to his own conclusions, of course, but that was inevitable anyway, so perhaps it was best to at least give the elf as much information as possible before he passed his usual inflexible judgment. 

Color soon came back into the child’s thin cheeks, and when he opened his eyes, they were clear instead of glazed with fever. Anders gave the mother a few potions and ushered them out as politely as possible, before hurrying back to the storeroom, gnawing on a few leaves of elfroot to calm the unease in his stomach. 

Fenris was gone. On his pillow, spread over his mother’s embroidery like the flayed corpse of a bird, was the pile of feathers.


	17. Chapter 17

Each slap of Fenris’s feet on the stone steps to Hightown was punctuated by the remembered voice of Hadriana berating him, hectoring him as she always had. “Idiot.” _Slap_. “Fool.” _Slap_. “Imbecile.” _Slap_. He _had_ been an idiot to go to Anders’s clinic, a fool to repeat a mistake that he should have learned from, an imbecile to repeat a mistake and do it while bearing a ridiculous _gift_. But the mage had seemed so earnest at the Blooming Rose, so genuinely happy to see him, that it was easy to dismiss his last failed visit to the clinic as a lapse, another strange quirk of Anders’s intermittent control of Justice.

For he _had_ gone to the clinic after they had killed Hadriana. Granted, he had laid waste to the dregs of the mansion’s wine cellar for a few days, gulping down bottle after bottle, knocking over the empty wine racks until the floor was a glittering field of broken glass, and then falling asleep with his face buried in the cushion of the armchair where Anders had slept. It was his way – slaves in the Imperium didn’t have anyone to wipe their tears or pat their backs, so the choice was between compressing every emotion one had into something so small and dense that it could be hidden away in one’s mind, kept separate from such necessary thoughts as how one’s master liked his breakfast cooked or his robes hung up, or sneaking the leftover wine from guests’ glasses after a party and sulking in one’s cell alone until morning. Or, in Fenris’s case, a combination of the two. 

But now his taste for wine had been surmounted by a different kind of craving – and a much more embarrassing one, he had to admit – and he’d found himself knocking on the locked door of Anders’s clinic, glaring up at the extinguished lantern. He could hear muttering inside, muffled by the wood of the door and almost drowned out by the scratch of a quill on parchment. 

He’d been on the point of activating his markings and slipping his fist through the door to unlock the bolt when the door had opened and the whirling luminescence of Justice’s gaze had greeted him. Before he could decide how to address the spirit – did he ask if Anders was at home, as if the man’s body weren’t right there before him? – Justice had commanded, in a voice like the boom of Qunari _gaatlok_ detonating, “Leave! You must not be allowed to distract us from our purpose!” The blue light of the Fade had shone through cracks in Anders’s face, livid as Fenris’s own lyrium brands. “Go! Anders has no need of you!” 

The door had slammed with a force that threatened to shake down the whole decrepit structure, the bolt had shot back into place, and it seemed to Fenris that a door had crashed shut within him as well, containing whatever had been growing in him, this thing that needed – wanted – companionship, this thing that had been sending out tentative feelers toward Anders like some blind Darkspawn creature fumbling through the Deep Roads. He’d spent all the coin in his pouch on the throat-searing, gut-churning rum at the Hanged Man that night and had been scraping together what silvers he could find in the mansion to drink at the Blooming Rose. While he abhorred the business done there, he knew it was only a matter of time before Anders came in for his visit to heal the _companions_. If Fenris kept his back to the main lounge and ignored bawdy talk in the background and the coos and caresses of the companions trying to get him to spend his coin on them, he could tell himself it was just like any other tavern. And his persistence had eventually paid off, when Anders had suddenly appeared at his elbow, just when he was gulping down the last swallow of wine he could afford. 

How had he let the mage ingratiate himself to him again? Was he that desperate, that a few kisses and a weak assurance that that wasn’t all Anders wanted from him were enough to make him forget the mage’s bizarre mood swings, the times when he took Fenris to task for things he had never done or said, the ever-present possibility of Justice taking over and ordering him away? The future – his future as a free man – had stretched before him, but once he’d followed its path, he’d found it to be a tunnel that grew minutely smaller with every inch, until gradually he was forced onto his knees to crawl, then onto his belly to slither. Perhaps he’d fooled himself into believing that having a companion would stop that sense of suffocation, that claustrophobia. Being alone had been a respite when he’d been a slave and safety when he’d been a fugitive, but now it was simply solitude, meaningless and empty, and now no longer able to be palliated with wine. 

The blackcurrant and mulberry-scented specter of spilled Agreggio filled his nose as he remembered Anders’s sanctimonious advice about life being a series of choices. Fenris had apparently chosen Anders – or blundered into choosing Anders, rather; been manipulated by fate into being stuck with Anders, if he was being uncharitable – to be that companion, that _friend_ , who would make the ongoing struggle that was life a little more tolerable. It had probably been too much to ask, considering what an intolerable person Anders often was. But now… he still wasn’t sure if he believed Hadriana, but if he could somehow contact this sister, maybe he wouldn’t need Anders after all. Not that a sister would fulfill _quite_ the same purpose as Anders had, but to have someone who cared if he came home at night, who bandaged his wounds, who valued him for who he was rather than _what_ he was, that would be enough. That would be more than he had ever had. 

The cats greeted him at the door of the mansion, Meowedith’s white paws and muzzle red with blood. She’d been hunting again, which meant another swallow corpse, its tiny talons frozen into stiff hooks, left on his pillow. _Dolt_ , Hadriana’s voice chided, as he remembered the “gift” he’d given Anders. 

Fenris dragged himself upstairs and sat on the bench beside the hearth, forgoing the armchair. He didn’t want to imagine Anders’s warm weight on him again, remember the feel of the mage’s lips wrapped around his cock, and sitting in the armchair would dredge all that up. Still, when he closed his eyes, he could see Anders behind them, coatless as he’d been in the stifling heat of the clinic, all creamy skin and golden hair and freckles, like one of those extravagant confections Danarius had served at his banquets, flecked with decorative but inedible gold leaf, as if the richness of the flavor weren’t decadence enough. He remembered his mouth watering for a taste of those desserts and always being denied even the smallest spoonful. 

He sat in the mercifully cool gloom and watched a spider spin its ever-expanding and ever-more-intricate web from the end of the bench to the hearth. He supposed he should have cleaned and dusted, but eventually one of the cats would blunder into the web and knock it down anyway. They’d already mostly taken care of the corpses for him, after all. Their disagreements echoed through the empty halls of the mansion, Meowedith’s harsh yowls, the Viscount of Catwall’s submissive mews, Soporatus’s rusty-sounding grousing. Was this how Anders had felt during his year in the tower when another foolishly named cat had been his only companion? 

The front door creaked open downstairs, and Fenris unsheathed his sword. The rare bandits who did venture into Hightown had learned quickly not to bother with this decaying mansion and its ghostly inhabitant, and the City Guard had been easy enough to bribe when the complaints of his neighbors had brought them to his door. 

“Fenris?” Anders’s voice drifted through the stale air. “Oh, Mister Pudding-Paws. Is your master home?” 

Fenris pressed his lips together to keep from smiling at the change in Anders’s tone when he addressed the cats. His voice became even warmer – and even more high-pitched – but it was also looser, more easily conversational. How odd that someone as gregarious as Anders was with people should have been easier with talking to an animal. 

Mister Pudding-Paws must have answered in the affirmative, because Fenris heard Anders crossing the main hall, and he went out onto the landing before the mage could start climbing the stairs up to the bedroom. Anders in the bedroom would have been too much of a temptation. Even when Fenris was angry with him – and justified in that anger – if they ended up in close proximity to one another, Fenris usually ended up with his brain fogged with lust, his heart fluttering in his chest, all of the calm he could summon in battle abandoning him. Leaning on the railing of the landing and looking down over the main hall as if he were the Viscount himself and Anders were the entire discontented populace of Hightown was a much better option, especially if Anders had to crane his neck a bit. 

“Oh, there you are,” Anders said as Fenris stepped out onto the landing. “I’m glad you’re here and I didn’t have to make a special trip to the Rose. They usually don’t let me in when I’m not there to heal because they know I don’t have the coin.” 

“What do you want?” Fenris asked, letting light flood into his markings. Anders blinked in surprise as the blue glow flared into existence, but he paused at the foot of the stairs and his hand fell from the banister. 

“To thank you properly for the gift,” Anders replied, the low light from the wall sconces catching the gleam in his eyes like morning sunlight glancing off of weak tea, and Fenris could tell from the silky warmth in his voice that Anders was smirking, that half-leer that should have been smarmy but was somehow… not entirely unpleasant. Fenris stepped closer to the railing and saw that feathers and red-and-gold fabric were peeking out from between Anders’s long white fingers, as if he’d had them clutched in his hand all the way from Darktown. 

Fenris made himself snort, a sound like a bedsheet being torn that re-echoed through the empty hall. “It was just a bunch of cat’s leavings,” he said, attempting a bored half-shrug. “Hardly a gift.” 

Anders bowed his head, leaving Fenris to stare at his straight hairline, pale skin meeting hair the warm, tawny yellow of grass at the end of the long Tevinter summer. “Oh, I see,” he murmured, shoving his hand into the pocket of his coat. After a moment, he looked up at Fenris – the angle would have brought back pleasant memories if not for the flatness in Anders’s eyes. “You also left before we could write the letter to your sister,” he said. How like him, Fenris thought, to always give the answer that would cast himself in the best light, as if to shame Fenris from any further argument. 

He crossed his arms over his chest, scraping his fingerguard over the steel of his vambrace. The quiet screech of metal on metal set his teeth on edge, and he noticed Anders cringe at the sound too. “I didn’t want to distract you from your purpose.” 

“You keep saying that,” Anders said, irritation crackling through his voice. “Have I ever called you a distraction? Because I don’t consider you one. But the clinic is my work and the people there depend on me, so sometimes I have to step away from what I _want_ to do in order to do the things I _have_ to do.” 

So he truly _didn’t_ recall what Justice said when the spirit was in control. Fenris had suspected as much for a while, though at first he’d accepted Anders’s own excuse that it had been illness and injury, rather than Justice. And when it had become clearer that it _was_ the spirit’s interference, he had still – perhaps unfairly – blamed Anders for it. After all, hadn’t Anders agreed to take the spirit into his body? Shouldn’t he be held accountable for its actions because of that choice? But over time, hairline cracks had begun to cobweb Fenris’s resolve. At this point, the tenuous glue holding it together was the mage’s unwillingness to admit that there _were_ gaps in his memory, gaps that he sometimes tried to fill with his own imaginings or just flatly refused to acknowledge. 

“You’re so changeable.” Anders was glaring up at him now, faint lines crinkling his forehead as he frowned. “I never know which Fenris I’m going to get – the one who gives me gifts and _apparently_ takes care of me when I’m ill, or the one who blames me for every wrong committed by mages and is offended when I heal dying children.” 

Fenris couldn’t swallow down the incredulous laughter that burst from his throat, and the sound of it seemed to startle Anders, though all too quickly the surprise on his face sank back into the lines of anger. “ _I’m_ changeable?” he spat, the wooden railing splintering in his grip as he leaned farther over it – his markings cast a faint glow over his face, and he wanted Anders to see the look of bitter amusement on it. “One minute you’re kissing me, and the next you’re rushing off because you don’t want to give a madam another silver for the use of a room. In one breath, you tell me you ache for me, and in the next – or near enough – you tell me that you have no need of me. _Which is it_ , mage?” Guilt itched at him for blaming Anders for words that Justice had spoken, especially since Fenris _knew_ it had been Justice, but he felt the mage’s hypocrisy deserved to be answered with some of his own. 

“I’m possessed by a spirit of Justice,” Anders said, voice dry as an aged Pavali. “What’s your excuse?” 

“One of your kind enslaved me and burned lyrium into my flesh to make me a living weapon,” Fenris replied, letting his markings blaze brighter for a moment. 

The mage’s nose wrinkled with indignation, his upper lip curling. Self-righteous anger – did he have any other kind? – glittered in his golden-brown eyes. Fenris waited for the expected tiresome diatribe about mages and mages’ rights, but it never came. No protestations of mage innocence, no rosy visions of a Tevinter that had never existed. If anything, Anders seemed to be waiting for _him_ , though if the mage was looking for an apology, he’d have to wait until the rest of the mansion collapsed around his ears. 

“Not that I should hold you any more responsible for that than you can hold me for your predicament with your spirit,” Fenris said. “And that was an explanation, not an excuse.” 

Anders brushed his fingertips over his brow and sighed, a sigh so thick with weariness that it seemed to have begun in the soles of his feet and gathered strength on the way up to his lips. Fenris thought it would rise like a wraith and hover in the musty air before dissipating. “I can’t speak for Justice. There are times when—when I don’t quite remember what he has said or done. If I’ve seemed indecisive or… _moody_ lately, it’s because of that. Not just the lost time, but….” 

Fenris heard him swallow, but when Anders spoke again, his voice sounded dry and choked, as if he’d been eating the sawdust that littered the floor of his clinic. “I was acting that way because I thought it was Justice who wanted you, not me.” 

Once the words started, they began flooding out of him like swarms of spiders in a Sundermount cave and made Fenris’s skin crawl just as much. “You told me I had said something about you _singing_ to me, and… Justice said the same thing once about a lyrium ring, and I thought… I was afraid that he was pulling me to you, for the lyrium in your— he usually isn’t interested in physical things, you understand, but I couldn’t think of any other reason why….” 

He glanced up at Fenris, a beseeching expression on his face, and Fenris raised an eyebrow at him, sending the mage’s gaze skittering away again, red staining the crests of his cheekbones. Anders seemed to rely on words for reasons that Fenris couldn’t quite fathom – there were always plenty of them, of course, but they were often haphazard, ill-considered. It was like he was playing darts by hurling a handful of them at the dartboard while blindfolded – one of them might hit the bull’s eye, but most of them would miss, and some might draw blood. “I mean, because of our obvious differences of opinion. Look, the thing is that I didn’t want to use you – or let Justice use you. So that was why I left the Rose that night.” He looked up at Fenris again, eyes wide. “I had to be sure.” 

_And are you?_ Fenris wanted to ask. As Anders had rambled, he’d felt his chest tighten, as if his own fist were clenched around his heart, squeezing it so tightly that blood could no longer pump through it. His knees trembled, and he steadied himself on the railing. All his hopes of being valued for himself had disintegrated, falling to pieces in his hands the way the old silk robes he’d found in the mansion’s attic had when he’d touched them. He would always be a _thing_ , a tool, a commodity. 

“So you and your demon were using me and now you feel guilty and want to unburden yourself?” he asked, vaguely relieved that his voice didn’t quake. Instead, it dripped with so much sarcasm and contempt, he could have wrung it out. 

“I _do_ feel guilty,” Anders said. “Or I _did_. But… you said that Justice had told you to go away? I don’t know when, but if he said that, it must mean that he’s not trying to be near your markings.” His head was tilted back to look up at Fenris, and the flickering candlelight made simmering puddles of gold in his wide eyes – Fenris imagined it was the look he might have used on his parents as a child when begging them for a kitten. 

Arguments rose to Fenris’s lips – perhaps Justice had simply been busy with their malcontent scribbling at the time and didn’t want to be disturbed – but he couldn’t make himself give them voice, as if doing so would instantly make them true. “It is… possible,” he said. 

Anders was climbing the stairs, slowly, hesitantly, his hand trailing along the banister, his eyes fixed on Fenris. It seemed to take an age for the mage to ascend the first flight of stairs – Fenris stared down at his clawed fingerguard digging a groove into the wood of the railing, trying to seem nonchalant about his approach, and yet his entire body felt attuned to Anders’s somehow, as if he were the needle of a compass and Anders was true north. The hair on the back of his neck and the fainter ones on his arms stood up, his flesh prickling with goosebumps. 

When Anders reached the first landing – just a few stairs between them – he hesitated, an air of wariness and apprehension lingering around him, like the animal trainers Fenris had seen in the magisters’ menageries in Tevinter. Did Anders still think him such a beast? He watched the mage drag one fingertip though the dust on the newel post, blond eyelashes lowered, as if he were doing intricate calculations that required all his attention. And yet there was a sense of awareness… of knowing Fenris was watching him, a self-consciousness tinged with provocation. The tip of Anders’s tongue swept over his full lower lip, leaving it damp and shining in the candlelight, and then he lifted his eyes to meet Fenris’s. 

The tenuous thread of self-control that Fenris had felt himself dangling from snapped at that look, the daring in it, the quick bite of Anders’s teeth into his gleaming lower lip, and he bounded down the shorter flight of steps toward the mage. His momentum carried him into Anders, shoving him back against the wall, dust raining down on them from the force of the impact. The expression of flirtatious hopefulness and expectation on Anders’s face had splintered with a sliver of fear as Fenris had rushed toward him – which he had to admit, even without his markings alight, must have been an intimidating sight – and Fenris squeezed his eyes shut to blot it out, cupping Anders’s head in his hands and pressing their lips together. 

It was a snake’s strike of a kiss – all coiled, pent-up tension, self-preservation, hunger, and something almost like fury, though he couldn’t tell if that fury was directed at Anders, at himself, or at Danarius, at the entire Imperium, at everything that had made him what he was, that had denied him so much of life. His lips felt bruised from the pressure, and yet when Anders’s hands rose and threaded through Fenris’s hair, binding them together, Fenris pushed even harder, his forehead pressing against the mage’s. 

He opened his eyes to find the Anders staring directly into them, his honey-brown irises swallowed by his pupils. _What is he looking at?_ he wondered, remembering Anders kissing his eyes closed before. Fenris assumed that that was how one kissed: with one’s eyes shut, perhaps to let the other senses take over, which had surprisingly worked – without the distraction of Anders’s amber hair and high cheekbones, he had better appreciated the tiny gulps of pleasure he made with each kiss, been able to savor the taste of the mage’s mouth, which wasn’t a taste at all so much as the salty warmth of sea air. Even the smell of crushed herbs on Anders’s fingers had seemed stronger. 

So why was the mage staring at him now? Was he doing something wrong? Panic scurried through him on tiny, clawed feet, and he pulled away, his lips leaving Anders’s. He fanned his thumb over Anders’s brow, then twisted his hand into his hair, pulling tight, suddenly resolved – unless the mage told him to stop, he wouldn’t, he very nearly _couldn’t_ – the need to be selfish, to worry less about pleasing Anders than pleasing himself galvanizing within him. Anders groaned, a hot judder of breath on Fenris’s cheeks, and then Fenris understood – he knew that exquisite suspense of being wanted but not yet knowing if one was being pleasing – and that was what he saw in Anders’s wide, dark eyes before they fluttered closed. 

And then Anders was shoving him backward, harder than a lanky, half-starved mage ought to have been able to, his lips never leaving Fenris’s even when he collided with the newel post. Fenris grunted as his spine cracked against the wooden post, and he gave Anders’s lower lip a quick warning bite that only made Anders push closer against him, his erection pressing against Fenris’s hip. 

“Maker’s whiffles,” Anders muttered. “Can I, Fenris?” 

Fenris hesitated, unsure of what he was asking – though he would have said yes to anything short of participating in blood magic at that point – until he felt magic hum through the markings along his back. He gave a quick nod, eager to have Anders’s mouth on his again, his tongue sweeping over his own, and Anders skimmed his fingertips along his spine, soothing the new bruise away. Even after the cool flicker of the magic had ebbed, Anders’s fingers remained, plucking at the gap in the back of his tunic as if his spine were a harp-string. 

Fenris both did and did not understand these small gestures of tenderness, seemingly meaningless, not aimed at any particular goal beyond just the enjoyment Anders got out of touching him. That he understood and wished he did not – Danarius had loved to stroke his favorite pet, clammy fingers sliding over muscle, dipping into the indents where it was lashed to bone, but it was done solely for the magister’s own pleasure, pleasure at the wonder that he had acquired, pleasure at the power that acquisition had given him. Danarius could have been touching any object of great value – animate or not – and derived something of the same satisfaction from it, whereas Fenris did not think that Anders would have, and not just because Anders lived in a sewer, didn’t have a copper to his name, and so simply did not have access to luxurious things. 

Perhaps Anders had trained himself not to want things the way that Fenris had, even things that were basic needs, like food and water. The mage certainly seemed indifferent to eating, often forgetting to do so or giving what little food he did have away, and Fenris still took little pleasure in it, even now that he didn’t have to worry about finding grubs or filth in his food. He somehow doubted, based on the eagerness of the mage’s kisses, that Anders had been stripped of what perhaps were universal desires the way he himself had – though Fenris couldn’t say for certain what those were for most people; any concept of them he might have had once had been scoured away by the magic that had for all intents and purposes created him. 

For Fenris, that had been part of Hadriana’s torments, to make the most fundamental needs somehow repugnant, to strip him of any urge or thought for himself, to make it impossible for him to ever be _normal_ , much less free. Before, he’d thought that she was doing it out of jealousy, personal hatred, cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and while he was sure they did motivate her, he now understood that it was all in the service of making him _not_ be. He wasn’t sure if he’d learned how to _be_ yet, even though he hadn’t been under her tutelage in years and had crushed her heart to pulp in his fist. He had _tried_ , of course. He had taken to buying himself an apple whenever he was in the marketplace to teach himself how to fulfill his own wants, how to reach for things simply because he wanted them, but – he realized as he gently sucked Anders’s tongue into his mouth – this was different, more complex, more difficult. An apple couldn’t enslave you, beat you, reject you. And still… if he ever wanted to be free, to create himself outside the image that Danarius and Hadriana had envisaged and brought to fruition, wouldn’t he have to _try_? 

Somehow they ended up sprawled out on the stairs, Fenris lying between Anders’s legs, his fingers working at the various buckles and fastenings on the mage’s coat. Anders’s hair had come loose from its leather cord and floated wide, curling around his head in gilded arcs – to Fenris’s eyes, they resembled the golden chains Danarius had made him wear, only broken, the links cloven into thin crescents. The mage looked as if he were drifting on the surface of murky water. Their kisses had become longer, looser, less frenzied, as if they were luxuriating in one another, though the insistent pressure of Anders’s erection still pushed against Fenris’s belly, and he felt his own arousal pulling him taut as a bowstring, growing tighter and tighter each time he thrust his hips against Anders’s. But he had made the mistake before of pushing too hard, too quickly, thinking only of the destination rather than the journey, perhaps because until that point, he had always walked on shackled legs, his map stolen from his hands. 

Finally he had peeled back all the layers that the mage wore – as if unwrapping a precious relic from a cushion of silk or a pile of feathers from a torn piece of blanket – and there was Anders, chest bare to Fenris for the first time. It was lighter than his arms, hands, and face, like a torrent of milk from the edge of his dark, sandy stubble to the waistband of his trousers, less cream than white, a white so cool that Fenris could see hints of bluish pink in it – the same pale shade as the plum blossoms that had bloomed in Danarius’s courtyard in spring. 

He quickly tore off his gauntlets, throwing them aside with a _clank_ , and ran his hand greedily over the bared skin, the smoothness of it, the surprising firmness of muscle, the hardness of bone too close to the surface. Anders arched up to meet his touch, letting out a soft gasp, as if Fenris’s hand were cold, his stomach contracting, making the hollows under his already prominent ribs even deeper, two pools of shadow that waxed and waned as he shuddered beneath Fenris’s fingers. The mellow gold of his eyes disappeared behind a haze of blond eyelashes and then silky eyelids, filigreed with intricate threads of purple veins. 

Fenris paused, watching the tiny ripple that Anders’s pulse made in his throat, his fingertips absently smoothing the faint golden dusting of hair on the mage’s chest. He didn’t know what to do – this wasn’t like swordplay, where the next move was fairly obvious, even though it was dependent on the actions of one’s opponent. He would have thought they would have been more alike – after all, both had basically one goal, orgasm and death, both offered a multitude of ways to reach that goal, and yet… Part of him wished Anders would speak, give him some hint in a breathless voice, but he didn’t want to be told either. Danarius and Hadriana had always demanded, maneuvered his body into the position that suited them, berated him until he got it right, and then he had just done as he was told until they were satisfied or gave him a new order. That had allowed him a certain amount of separation from what was being done, a refuge from it, knowing that it wasn’t his idea, his choice. But this… he wanted to be present, awake, aware, but more than anything, he wanted to _choose_. 

Slowly, carefully, as if expecting Anders to shove him away at any sudden move, he dipped his head down and dragged his lower lip over the flutter of Anders’s pulse, a brief slide of smooth, wet flesh over goosebump-pebbled, stubble-rough skin that left the taste of salt in his mouth. He felt Anders’s soft groan as much as he heard it, the bob of the mage’s adam’s apple against his cheek. The next moan was a vibration under his lips as he pressed them to that hard knuckle at the center of Anders’s throat. He filled the sweat-slick well between the mage’s collarbones with kisses, lingering there as his hands hovered a hairsbreadth above Anders’s ribs – they reminded him of the arches of the half-ruined spires of Minrathous, their apparent fragility misleading. But Anders’s body, for all that it could create and wield magic, was not held together by it – and Fenris felt the truth of that as his fingers caressed the tension of sinew and muscle, the pump of artery and vein, all warm and real in a way that magic could never be. 

“Please, Fenris, _please_ ,” Anders murmured, but he didn’t elaborate beyond briefly cupping the back of Fenris’s head in one hand and rocking his hips up against him. 

He grazed Anders’s chest with his open palms, feeling the mage’s nipples harden at even that slight of a touch. Anders let out a choked whimper, throwing his head back, his throat stretching, the skin of it churning as he gulped back more cries. Timidly, Fenris lowered his head and pushed his pursed lips against one pale pink nipple, gently, almost politely, as if he were dabbing his lips with a napkin. The mage jerked beneath his lips, his shoulders lifting off the stair – it seemed as if he were trying to fold himself around Fenris, and his arms rose, draping themselves around Fenris’s head in a loose embrace. 

Fenris went rigid, muscles tensed to the point of cramping, and he was suspended in place like the exotic animals that Danarius had had stuffed and put on display in his exhibition hall, forever frozen mid-pounce. He waited for Anders’s arms to tighten, to force his head down against the mage’s chest, holding Fenris’s face to his skin until he felt about to suffocate. But Anders’s fingertips just gently worried at his hair, combing through it, and Fenris – slowly releasing the breath he’d taken in expectation of being smothered, gagged, drowned in Anders’s flesh – realized that the mage was cradling his head with the same exquisite care he’d used when holding the glass sphere he’d made out of the shattered wine bottles. Cradling Fenris’s head, shuddering, burying his face against the crown of it, breath in tatters riffling his hair. It had not been an order, as Fenris was accustomed to, but a suggestion. 

Muscle by muscle, Fenris felt himself relax into Anders’s arms, unknot, settle onto the mage as Anders had been perfectly comfortable with doing to him. He kissed Anders’s nipple again, catching it gently between his teeth before dashing the smooth underside of his tongue over it, as if to soothe away the hurt of the soft bite. Anders moaned, rough, choked, hungry, the sound radiating through Fenris – his body answered it, the tightness in his groin becoming almost painful. 

“My neighbors are going to complain to the City Guard about your noise, mage,” he murmured against Anders’s chest, skimming his lips across it to kiss the other nipple, which made Anders’s groans crest like a peaking wave… and yet they somehow spiraled louder as Fenris ran his hand over his erection, tracing its outline through his trousers. He remembered the smoothness of Anders’s cock against his palm, the slipperiness of his come – Fenris had been indifferent before, perhaps even a bit disgusted, Anders’s body an instrument whose only use to him was to satisfy Anders enough that he would ask nothing more of him. But now… now his hands trembled as they caressed the rigid length of the mage’s cock, not out of fear – though he was terrified of doing something wrong – but out of eagerness, from the struggle of having to hold himself back. A strange quivering built in his stomach. He had so rarely felt excitement, a true anticipation of pleasure, that it seemed like an illness, a fever, complete with ague and chills. 

He continued to stroke Anders through his trousers as he left a trail of kisses down the mage’s stomach, feeling it quake beneath his lips. When he reached the laces of Anders’s trousers, he paused, intending to pull them open and take Anders’s cock into his mouth, let his tongue learn the satiny feel of it that his fingers already knew. But his hands would not cooperate, clenching themselves into fists in the worn fabric. He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself, and instead of smelling Anders – that jumble of musk, crushed elfroot, clover, warm skin – the remembered odor of Danarius, the perfumed oils that he had made his personal slaves smear over his body, never to be washed away but only layered over until they were sickly, rancid, tainted with the gamy smell of age, filled his nostrils, coating his throat until he nearly retched. 

Bile gushed over his tongue, and he tried to swallow it down, squeezing his eyes shut, only to find behind his eyelids the memory of Danarius standing over him, thrusting his prick into Fenris’s mouth, his hands digging into Fenris’s scalp to hold him in place. His eyes started to stream, as they had back then, as if he were gagging on Danarius’s cock all over again, the bitter taste of spunk coating his tongue, his face awash in tears and snot. 

“Fenris?” Anders’s voice sounded muffled, a brass bell with the clapper muted. “Fenris? Are you all right?” Long-fingered hands wrapped around Fenris’s wrists, carefully prizing his fingers from their grip on Anders’s trousers. 

“I’m sorry,” Fenris said, his arousal scattering like motes of dust. He rolled off of Anders and away from him, curling up uncomfortably on the stairs. He couldn’t make himself meet Anders’s eyes, knowing that he would find concern in them rather than anger, which was somehow more frightening. “I can’t… I’m sorry,” he repeated and buried his face in the crook of his elbow. 

Fenris sensed Anders sitting up on the steps, and a small gust stirred the hair against his temples as the mage pulled his coat shut over his bare chest. He felt like a sulking child, hiding his face in his arm, as if he were still trapped in that part of childhood where one believes that if one cannot see, one cannot be seen. He heard Anders moving, heard the clink of steel as the mage gathered up Fenris’s gauntlets and vambraces, and then Anders was gingerly taking Fenris’s arm in his hands and carefully sliding his fingers into the gauntlet, strapping the vambrace to his forearm. Without looking up, Fenris shifted, passively offering his other arm to Anders for him to strap on the discarded armor, the way Knight-Commander Meowedith would casually raise a paw for the Viscount of Catwall to lick when he was grooming her. 

After Anders had finished buckling on the other gauntlet, he let go of Fenris’s hand – it dropped limply onto the stair next to the other. Fenris stared at them, spiked, clawed, repellent, an armored and impenetrable carapace, and yet he felt they belonged to him more like this. He didn’t look up even when Anders’s fingertips swept through his hair, just brushing the tip of his ear, the mage’s palm running down his cheek until it cupped his chin. That hand tried to tilt his head up, but he kept it bowed, shivering at the touch. He felt undeserving of the kindness, shame dragging at him like heavy manacles. 

Anders sighed, surrendering the minute struggle they’d been engaged in, and a niggling splinter of pleasure pierced Fenris – he could still refuse Anders, at least. He still had _that_ power over himself. Anders, seeming to mistake the tiny smirk Fenris had allowed himself, leaned over and kissed his forehead, his stubble scraping against the spots of lyrium there. 

“Stop treating me like a child,” Fenris said, feeling his upper lip writhe from a smirk into a sneer. He didn’t remember being a child – and he somehow doubted that when he’d been one, he’d been coddled like this. 

“Not like a child,” Anders replied, eyelids fluttering with a few rapid, startled blinks. His hand left Fenris’s chin, only to be replaced by his handkerchief – gray with too many washes – wiping his cheeks. Fenris batted it away, and it drifted to the floor like a dead moth. “A patient, perhaps. If I knew of a spell that could heal what was done to you, I would be casting it right now. But I don’t, so I’m doing what I know how to do.” 

_He wants someone_ normal, Fenris thought, _someone who can drop to their knees like it’s no more difficult than_ … Than what? The thought unraveled and rewove itself as something more complex, like a woman pulling out a knitted sock to reknit the yarn into lace – he didn’t _know_ what others found simple or difficult, and he suspected that his own concepts of simplicity or difficulty would have baffled someone else. He flexed his hands in their gauntlets, hearing the jointed metal pieces rasp together, that feeling of being manmade, unnatural coming over him again. He was being unfair toward Anders – who had never complained about Fenris’s failings, at least not in that context, who had never demanded or pushed. _But this is what I have become. This is what I am. And it is not sufficient_. The steel of his thumbguard screeched over the backs of his fingerguards as he clenched his fist. _This is why weapons were not meant to have feelings_. 

“This is what I do, Fenris. I try to help,” Anders continued, voice mild, plucking up the handkerchief and tucking it into his coat. Fenris thought he caught a hint of that faint buttery smell he remembered from the day Anders had given him the handkerchief to tie over his nose and mouth against the chokedamp. Hunger, though not for food, quivered in his stomach. “I went for years only taking, interspersed with years when a single gentle hand or kind word would have been a rare comfort, so if I can offer them, I will.” His chin seemed to crumple, though he tried to hide it with a frown. “When I’m allowed to,” he finished, smacking his lips as if he could taste the bitterness that Fenris could hear in his words. 

Somehow Fenris knew that Anders wasn’t referring to him – the frustration on his face was turned inward now, and Anders would never miss an opportunity to vent his irritation out loud and directly. _Justice_ , Fenris thought, _he’s still thinking of the apprentices_. His hand strayed toward Anders’s knee, the claw of his smallest finger brushing against the threadbare fabric of his trousers before dropping back to the stair. 

“Which makes me sound like bloody Andraste herself, and that’s clearly not the case,” Anders said, pushing himself to his feet. His tone was suddenly brisk, almost cheerful, but it rang false – or at least forced – to Fenris’s ears. “I’m perfectly happy to deny comfort to those who don’t deserve it. Like templars and slavers and people who prefer dogs to cats.” 

He leaned over to offer Fenris a hand, and Fenris took it, pasting the hint of a smile on his lips for Anders’s benefit and let the mage tug him to his feet. Standing one stair up from Fenris, Anders seemed even taller – Fenris found himself staring at his chest, shadowed by the edges of his open coat. The mage didn’t let go of his hand even when he was on his feet but held it fast, his index finger curling and uncurling over Fenris’s palm. He shivered – the only magic that crackled from Anders’s fingers was that which only affected his unscarred skin, that heady, mind-fogging magic of being touched with kindness, the spell cast by skin on skin. He hooked his finger through one of the dangling buckles of Anders’s coat and pulled himself toward the mage until his forehead nudged against Anders’s breastbone. 

“This is what I mean about being changeable,” Anders murmured, his breath stirring Fenris’s hair. “But it’s an observation, not a condemnation.” 

In his peripheral vision, Fenris could see Anders’s hair, still loose, falling around their faces in long, golden strands, like honey spilled and dripping on a freezing day. Smiling, he pressed his face against the mage’s chest, as if trying to brand Anders’s flesh with the curve of his own lips. His eyes sank shut as he breathed in the warm scent of Anders’s skin, the jumble of odors that he might have once found unpleasant, but now only found _human_ , without the decaying artifice of Danarius and his oils or the cloying clash of perfume and nervous sweat of Hadriana. 

Behind his closed eyes, he saw flickering golden light, as if he were running under a canopy of trees, and then he smelled only damp and the sourness of rotting leaves and the heavy, soporific scent of jungle flowers. For a moment, he thought he was remembering his time with the Fog Warriors, but then, in the same flashing sunlight, he saw a long, red braid, studded with lush blossoms whose fragrance wafted to him as he chased… his sister. _Varania_. He had been told before that he was from Seheron, and he recognized the jungle as being that of the island, but he should not have remembered being there with her. He shouldn’t have remembered her at all. 

“Mage?” 

“Hm?” was Anders’s reply, hummed against the top of Fenris’s head. 

“Could you help me write a letter to my sister?”


	18. Chapter 18

The city languished in the heat for months, its people crushed between the sun above and the chokedamp rising from below. Patients died who should have survived, in spite of Anders’s best efforts, and on most days, the clinic stayed empty, as if not even illness could stir the refugees from whatever shadowy warrens they had found in the sewers, trading cool for chokedamp and filth. With the heat came a kind of madness – rumors circulated that the Viscount’s son had converted to the Qun, that women were disappearing off the sun-scorched streets in the middle of the day and never seen again, that templars were succumbing to possession. The Undercity often was unaffected by what went on aboveground, but still Anders couldn’t help but wonder again, as he watched the sweat dripping from his face blur the fresh ink on the pages before him, why he was staying in Kirkwall. Karl was gone; the retreat of the Blight in Ferelden had staunched the flow of refugees into the Free Marches. His healing was still needed here, but it would have been just as much in demand in any war-torn city in Thedas. He knew why Justice wanted to stay – Kirkwall’s Circle was repressive, the rights of its mages needed to be fought for, but also the Veil in Kirkwall was thin, gossamer as silk, worn away by the feckless magic of the Imperium magisters and the deaths of countless slaves. The Fade must have gleamed green and alluring to Justice through that weakened barrier, the home he’d been torn from calling to him like the lyrium in Fenris’s flesh.

But Anders still nominally had control of their shared body, and if he’d wanted to leave Kirkwall, he could have. He’d even made half-hearted gestures at leaving, like sorting his belongings into a “keep” pile and a “trash” pile, and packed the “keep” pile into an embarrassingly small bundle so he could leave at a moment’s notice. 

He hadn’t. 

Even thinking of leaving had become more a habit than an actual desire. 

The front door rattled as someone pounded on it with a gauntleted fist. Once, he would have been grabbing his staff, letting Justice take him over in anticipation of facing templars ready to drag him off to the Circle or the hangman’s noose, but now he just stretched, knuckling the small of his back, and got up to unbolt the door. 

“Mage,” Fenris called through the splintered wood, his voice like an old iron portcullis being raised after years of having its teeth sunk into the ground. Once – maybe because it used to be said in the same tone as “nug” or “shit” would have been – Anders had bristled at being called “mage”, but now he almost preferred it, coming from Fenris at least. It seemed to belong to him more than “Anders”, which was a descriptor that applied to his father rather than to him. 

He swung the door open and stepped aside to let Fenris in, the elf sidling past as if he had to sneak. There was always this initial awkwardness between them – which Anders liked to tell himself was all on Fenris’s side. It was if they were both afraid that the other had forgotten the hours they’d spent killing slavers at the docks or combing the slopes of Sundermount for elfroot – and for the Dalish clan’s halla, which Fenris had wanted to see – or sitting on the stone balcony of Fenris’s mansion, reading some of Lirene’s awful _Swords & Shields_ novels under the pretext of working on Fenris’s reading, though Anders mostly enjoyed watching him blush during the romantic parts. 

And so they fell back into their old roles for a few minutes – Fenris as the mage-hating slave and Anders as the mage angry at being hated for an accident of birth, though really that feeling never went away, it just was eventually tamped down with Fenris to a dull smolder rather than a conflagration. If he had had his way, he would have met Fenris at the door with a kiss, would have twirled the elf’s hair around his fingers as he read to him, but Fenris still shied away from most casual displays of affection as if they confused him or as if there were some other kind of ulterior motive behind them. There always had to be some struggle, some battle to earn respect and trust again – it was like having to unbuckle and unfasten every piece of Fenris’s armor just to be able to touch him without waking up with mysterious bruises the next morning. 

“Not that I’m _not_ pleased to see you, but I thought we were meeting at the docks tonight,” Anders said, leaning against the doorjamb and watching Fenris pace back and forth among the empty cots. He was clutching a folded piece of paper in one fist, like a lily bud crushed in his steel gauntlet. 

“I know, I’m sorry. But I had to speak with you,” Fenris replied, turning to look at Anders, a hint of apprehension furrowing his black brows and pursing his lips. 

“Something about that parchment you’re throttling?” Anders asked, smiling as red suffused Fenris’s cheeks. The elf opened his hand with a jerk, as if the paper were a bird he’d been holding too tightly. Anders leaned forward and snatched the page out of the air before it could hit the ground, smoothing it out on the front of his coat. 

“I could make out some of it,” Fenris muttered, the tips of his ears red now as well. “But I wanted you to read it too, so I could be sure.” 

Anders’s hands shook as they gripped the paper, making it crack and snap like a banner in a gale. He knew what the sheet of parchment was, and for a moment, he felt as if he were in the Deep Roads again for the first time, miles and miles of heavy rock pressing down on him, ready to collapse at any moment. His stomach plunged, but – feeling Fenris’s expectant gaze on him – he forced himself to look down at the paper. 

The letter was creased as if it had been folded and refolded many times, and he could see tiny rents under the lines of script, as if Fenris had run his spiked fingerguard along it to follow the words – they reminded him of the tears in Fenris’s pillowcase and sheets from all the nights he must have gone to sleep without taking off his gauntlets and clawed his way out of his nightmares with them. The page shimmered before Anders’s eyes as they welled up, but he blinked the moisture away. He wished he were that paragon of unselfishness that Justice had tried so hard to turn him into – he _wanted_ to be happy for Fenris, to not fear that any communication from Fenris’s sister would bring change to his own life, even as he hoped that it would change Fenris’s. If Fenris decided to leave Kirkwall with her… when Karl had left Ferelden for the Free Marches, at least Anders had had the meager comfort of knowing that he’d been forced to by the First Enchanter – with Fenris, it would be a choice, and Anders wouldn’t make the mistake of trying to follow him. And yet still he wanted to drop the letter, catch Fenris up in his arms – the Void take the spiky armor and tendency to poke at internal organs with clawed gauntlets – and press his cheek against Fenris’s breastplate until the chevrons on it branded his cheek. 

He remembered the night they’d written it – the double jolt he’d gotten from realizing that Fenris hadn’t given up on finding his sister as he’d thought and the fact that Fenris was asking _him_ for help, purely for himself, not as a way to assuage Anders’s guilt or to clean up someone else’s mess. To Anders, it was a show of trust far greater than anything physical Fenris had tried to give him in return, not least because there had been no offer of recompense afterward, no more of that tit-for-tat bartering that had seemed more like a business arrangement than a friendship. 

In the mansion’s musty-smelling library, Fenris had found paper and a well of ink that hadn’t dried into dust, and using one of the larger feathers that Fenris had brought him, Anders had set to work on the letter. Or he would have, if Fenris had dictated anything to him. The elf was usually surprisingly articulate, even eloquent, if often sparing with his words, but then he had been struck dumb, staring pleadingly at Anders from under his white forelock, as if willing him to read his thoughts. 

“I’m a mage, not a mindreader,” Anders said. “What do you want to say? Do you want her to write back? Do you want her to come here? I somehow doubt that you would want to visit her.” 

The prompting – which Anders had thought was perfectly helpful – had only earned him a glare from Fenris. He had started pacing up and down along the length of the table where Anders was sitting, punching the top of it with his gauntleted fist from time to time in frustration. It didn’t seem to knock any words free, though it did almost upend the inkwell and startled the various cats who had been sleeping in the room. Anders fidgeted with the quill as he waited, swishing the tip of the feather back and forth until the Viscount of Catwall overcame his fear of Fenris’s thumping and jumped onto the table to swat at it. 

“The last time we discussed it, it seemed that you’d decided contacting her was too dangerous,” Anders said, darting in for a few ear scritches while the Viscount of Catwall was distracted by the wagging quill. 

Fenris had paused in his pacing, poking at a burl in the wood of the table with his claw, as if it were a watching eye and he was trying to blind it. “I can’t simply leave it like this. I have to know.” His voice dropped until Anders could barely hear him over the cat’s purring. “Sometimes – like just now when we were… sometimes when I’m with you, I get flashes of things, memories, maybe. I think they’re of Varania, and I need to know if they’re real.” 

Anders had blinked, trying to hide his surprise behind a smile that he’d hoped Fenris would realize was teasing. “I’m not sure how I feel about making you think of your sister.” 

“It’s not like that,” Fenris replied, anger foxing the edges of his voice. “It’s just… how I feel when we’re… when you’re around, something about it calls up memories. Maybe it’s something to do with your spirit,” he offered, the suggestion as limp as the birds that he’d said Meowedith was leaving on his pillow. “It doesn’t matter why I’m remembering. I just need to know if she can tell me anything else about my past. Who I was before these,” he said, sweeping a hand over the lyrium tendrils tangled on his biceps. 

Anders nodded, staring down at the blank page in front of him as if trying to read the words that had yet to be written on it. He had purposefully erased parts of his own past with a careful editing hand that he didn’t apply to his manifesto, but lately these deletions had not been of his own choosing, these little snatches of forgotten time. Would he want to know what had happened, even in just a few lost minutes? Maybe, because he would have been held accountable for them in a way that Fenris wasn’t for his past. What would it have been like to create yourself new, he wondered. But for him, it would always be impossible – he had Justice, the darkspawn taint in his blood, the birthright of being a mage, none of which could be removed or escaped from or rubbed away with a chunk of sandstone like a stray ink mark. 

“Then you should ask her to come here,” he suggested finally, forcing himself to smooth the words out as he spoke them, to hide how grudging they were. Kirkwall had not felt any more like home, but it had begun to feel _comfortable_ – heat and stench and constant threat of death or Tranquility aside – and Varania could upset all of that… if she responded at all. “It would be easier for you, I think. I would be happy to read any letter she sent you, but I’m sure you’d prefer some privacy.” 

“Yes,” Fenris said. Anders bent over the paper, not looking up at him, but he could feel Fenris’s eyes on him. “Thank you.” 

“I’ll write a brief explanation of who you are, how you came to find out about her, and then ask her to come to Kirkwall. Will that do?” Anders asked, trying to fake the disinterested tone of a professional scribe and wincing at how terribly he managed it. 

“Yes,” Fenris said again, the word somehow smaller, half-swallowed. The hollow tap of his fingerguard on the tabletop echoed through the room, drowning out the scratch of Anders’s quill on the parchment. “I… It wasn’t you.” 

“Hm?” Anders murmured, as if engrossed in casting the perfect sentence to convince a stranger that her long-lost brother was alive, albeit covered in enough lyrium to buy a villa in Val Royeaux. “Before. I didn’t stop because of you… or anything you did. I just…” The pad of bare feet started up again, and the corner of the paper began to curl and uncurl with the breeze generated by Fenris’s pacing. 

“I’m glad,” Anders said, daring a sidelong glance at Fenris as he passed, though all he saw was a long, slender flank, the curve of a buttock covered by spirit hide. 

“You are not angry? Or… disappointed?” Fenris asked, and Anders thought he heard the faintest trace of disappointment from Fenris himself. 

With a sigh, he set down the quill. Usually he could rattle away while his hands were busy doing something else, but with Fenris, it was too easy to say the wrong thing – he felt like he needed to focus on their conversations in a way he didn’t with other people, and even then he still usually ended up with the taste of his own foot on his tongue. “I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed about not having my ashes hauled….” 

He glanced up at Fenris to find him with his black brows furrowed, silently mouthing the word “ashes” and hurried on. “But that’s just a physical disappointment, if you see what I mean? Like if you’d cooked up a nice meal – roasted potatoes and chicken and bread steaming from the oven –” His stomach growled, earning him a curious look from both Fenris and the Viscount of Catwall, who swatted at his bare abdomen as if he had read some kind of feline aggression in its rumbling. “—and then as you were carrying it to the table, you dropped it all on the floor and it was ruined, and you had to make do with… runny gruel or something. So it’s not what you were hoping for, but it was no one’s fault either and in the end, you’re still not hungry.” 

Fenris seemed to be having a deep internal argument with himself as to whether or not he should be offended – his brow still crimped with effort, his teeth nibbling on the plump crescent of his lower lip – so Anders plunged on. “In a way, I might have been more disappointed if it turned out that you’d done something you didn’t want to do, just because you felt like you had to.” 

The elf gave one of his skeptical sniffs and said, “You say that _now_ ….” 

“Look, Fenris, the good thing about the meal dropped on the floor is that you know you can make it again. Unless it was the last chicken in Thedas, in which case you’re fucked, but duck would be fine too, or ram…” At the tiny clink of fingerguard on vambrace, he swallowed, trying to gather his thoughts like a woman collecting apples in her apron – they kept rolling about, tumbling out of place, making him chase after them. “What I mean is that because something didn’t happen this time doesn’t mean it never will, especially if the reason for it is still there.” 

“So in the meantime, I should make gruel?” Fenris asked, that little curl that Anders always wanted to kiss or trace with his fingertip but was never quick enough to catch flickering at the corner of his lips. 

“If you want to. I wouldn’t turn it down,” Anders replied with a smile. He watched Fenris circle the table and take the chair across from him. Bare toes brushed against his ankle, easily discernible through the thin, worn leather of his boot, and he cleared his throat. “Now, the letter. We should finish it and send it off.” 

“I don’t even know how to get a letter to the Imperium,” Fenris muttered, shoulders drooping, and shoved his hand through his hair, pushing it off his forehead. 

Anders flicked the end of the quill against his chin, feeling the soft feather catch in his stubble. “Mistress Selby could help,” he suggested. One of Fenris’s eyebrows arched upward, this time pointedly skeptical – it was foolish to mention the Mage Underground so soon after the debacle with Hadriana, but their options were so limited as to be almost nonexistent. “She does other things than the Mage Underground,” he said, trying and mostly failing to not sound petulant. “At the very least, she’d know of a ship heading toward Tevinter.” 

“Very well,” Fenris said with a sigh. “As always, I am grateful for your help, even though I wish your associates were…” 

“…not filthy mage sympathizers?” Anders finished for him, glancing up from the page with a little smile that seemed to make Fenris’s cheeks flush. The elf opened his mouth as if to contradict him, but Anders said, “Not too long ago, you and I were associates. What are we now?” 

That made Fenris’s blush deepen, and he jerked his eyes away from Anders’s, turning his head to cough into his fist. “I—uh… I’m afraid my limited vocabulary does not contain an adequate word for that,” he said finally, voice tinder-dry. 

“I’m sure there’s a long, complicated word for it in the Anderfels,” Anders replied with a laugh. Fenris’s cheek twitched again, that faint upward curve of his lips that would have been a smile if he’d let it. “And your vocabulary is hardly limited. I’m afraid once you start dictating this letter, my spelling won’t be equal to it.” 

  
The windows darkened from the purplish-rose of evening to the deep blue of night as they worked on the letter, Fenris getting up to light the wall sconces and bring a lamp to the table. Anders raised his head from his writing to light it with a wisp of fire magic and found a round yellow apple sitting beside the lamp, flushed with red here and there as if it were blushing. 

“You’re hungry,” Fenris said, retaking his seat across the table. He watched Anders expectantly as he picked up the apple, the steady glow from the lamp turning his eyes the color of new spring leaves with the sun shining through them and his hair the pale gold of a just-risen moon. _Looking for approval again_ , Anders thought, though now it didn’t disturb him as it had before, maybe because he felt like he’d earned it in a way – not the right to be the one to give Fenris approval but being worthy of having his approval sought. 

“Nearly always, yes,” Anders replied. “I didn’t know you kept food here, though. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you eat.” He took a bite – the flesh was crisp, giving beneath his teeth with a crunch, and juice ran over his lips and down his chin, so tart it stung the insides of his cheeks. _Far more tart than sweet_ , he thought, wiping the juice from his chin with the back of his hand and then tossing the apple to Fenris. The elf looked startled even as he easily snatched the apple out of the air, and he waited until Anders went back to writing before taking a bite himself. 

Anders dumped a handful of sand onto the freshly inked letter from the battered tin sand box Fenris had found with the inkwell and blew it away carefully. “There,” he said, folding the sheets of parchment into thirds – it had taken several pages to properly explain everything, though Fenris had insisted on it. “Done. I can give this to Mistress Selby in the morning, if you’d like,” he said, pushing his chair back from the table and standing up. 

“You’re not leaving?” Fenris asked, his glance a quick upward slash that almost made Anders crumple back into his chair. 

“I… the clinic…” he began half-heartedly. “Can wait until morning, I suppose. If it hasn’t spontaneously burst into flames or melted in this heat. It really is far cooler up here.” He glanced over his shoulder toward the bed, the armchair still beside it from the last time he’d slept there, and then turned guiltily back toward Fenris, his face hot. “I think it’s your turn to sleep in the chair.” 

“Get into bed, mage,” Fenris said in a tone that would have almost been threatening if that tiny smile had not been pleating up the corner of his lips again. 

Anders slipped off his coat and draped it carefully over the end of the table. He would have slept in it, especially since Fenris had partly torn the front of his shirt earlier – maybe the elf would mend it when he sewed the new feathers onto Anders’s pauldrons – but even in the relative cool of the mansion, sweat still streamed in rivulets down his spine, branching into estuaries when it came to one of his scars. 

Fenris was watching him with the same expression that the Viscount of Catwall had had for the twitching end of Anders’s quill, and for a moment, Anders was tempted to walk backward toward the bed, as if Fenris could see the scars through his shirt. Which was a definite possibility, considering how old the shirt was and how many washings it had endured. He couldn’t say _why_ he wanted to hide the scars from Fenris – after all, the elf was covered in them himself, though there was stark difference between the puckered, gnarled scar tissue on his back and the sinuous, silvery tendrils of lyrium that twined around Fenris’s limbs. 

He walked over to the bed as nonchalantly as possible, glad of the dimness in the room, which deepened as Fenris scraped back his chair and Anders heard him blowing out the wall sconces. When he glanced over his shoulder, the lamp Fenris carried wove like a firefly in the increasing gloom – he could make out the ghostly halo of hair, a shimmer of lyrium, the glint of gold in Fenris’s eyes, but little else. A shiver coursed through him, and he made himself lie down on the bed, pulling the torn blanket over himself in spite of the heat. It was a relief when Fenris set the lamp on the small table beside the bed and began to unfasten his gauntlets. 

“You don’t sleep with them on?” Anders asked, sticking his finger through one of the tears in the blanket and wriggling it. 

“Not anymore,” Fenris replied in a soft voice that made Anders’s stomach clench. 

He rolled back over, facing the wall and watching the silhouette of his own shoulder shift in the lamplight, a cliff of shadow that shuddered as the flame leapt. Fenris’s gauntlets made a metallic slap as they hit the seat of the armchair, and then the shadow of a slim, bare hand cupped around the glass chimney of the lamp. 

“Could you leave it burning?” Anders asked, directing his question at the wall, unwilling to deal with the possibility of either Fenris’s confusion or his contempt – or, worst of all, his mockery. “It will burn itself out safely before morning.” 

The shadow of Fenris’s hand hovered above the lamp for a moment longer and then flitted away like a dark moth. “If you wish it.” 

Anders waited for the creak of the old armchair as Fenris settled into it, but instead the other side of the mattress dipped under the elf’s weight and then the heat of Fenris’s body pressed against his back. Somehow the urge to flinch away and the urge to move closer to Fenris battled to a stalemate, and he remained still, if rigidly tense, as if he were lying on the edge of a precipice rather than on the edge of a sagging mattress on a low, too-small bed. The blanket was between them, not an inch of bare flesh touching, and still Fenris seemed to cover him like a cloak against the winter wind, radiating warmth through the brocade fabric. How long had it been since he’d shared a bed with someone, or even just a bedroll – simply sleeping, taking comfort in the feel of someone’s warm, steady breath against his back, their legs following the curve of his own? 

He wished he could have rolled over to watch Fenris’s face as the elf fell asleep – feeling the tension go out of Fenris against his back was strange, as if Fenris himself had departed, leaving behind an empty body, one that was somehow not him. Of course, Fenris had slept for days the first time they’d met, but Anders had never seen him be overtaken by it – did he battle it as he did everything else? Or did he nestle into it the way he did against Anders now, with an eager tenderness that Anders would once have not thought him capable of? He could feel the reverberation of Fenris’s heartbeat vibrate in his own ribcage, and the rise and fall of Fenris’s breath rocked him minutely, as if he were lying in a tiny boat on a calm sea, tilting gently this way and that with each soft slap of the waves. It reminded him of his first months as a Grey Warden, when he’d slowly learned to distinguish the feel of darkspawn from the feel of his fellow Wardens, been able to sense how far away they were, even – eventually – to tell them apart, like unraveling different colors of thread from a tapestry, and what had first been unsettling had become comforting, that feeling of connection, of not being alone. 

When he finally relaxed into sleep himself, though, it was not darkspawn or the Deep Roads that waited for him in the Fade, but the dungeon at Kinloch Hold, the blue-tinged dark, the cots stained with blood and filth from other bodies that had suffered there before him, the repeated suffocating blows of Smite being cast on him again and again, cutting him off from his magic. He was back there again, in the dank, following the stone walls with fingertips callused from doing so, learning each inch of his prison within his reach, the knowledge slowly sinking in that there was no way out other than death, since it seemed likely to come sooner than templar mercy. The sobs and groans from the next cell, which had faded to inhuman whimpers and then to silence, echoed in his head, as they had on those long days when he’d strained at his chains to see the other prisoner, to take stock of their wounds – he’d begged his jailors to let the Silence wear off just long enough for him to build up enough mana to heal that unseen other captive, but his pleas had been met with laughter, a gauntleted backhand across the mouth, a kick to ribs already girdled with bruises. And then the cries had stopped, and after a few days, the sickly-sweet odor of decay had begun, and Anders had been alone again. 

He clawed his way out of sleep, screaming, hands crackling with magic. 

“You will never take me again!” he heard himself shout, though it wasn’t his voice anymore, but Justice’s, the spirit rushing in as he always did when Anders was threatened. 

“Mage!” a voice called – muddled with sleep, startled, perhaps frightened. “Maker’s arse, mage! Wake up!” 

Anders blinked into the darkness, which was slowly resolving itself into not-darkness, the honeyed glow of the fire wisp still flickering away in the lamp, amber against the blue light radiating from his own skin. He was sitting up in Fenris’s bed, he realized, the shreds of the red-and-gold blanket strewn around him as the bodies of templars and Wardens had been when he’d first woken up with Justice in him, his heart pounding in his throat. _Fenris_. He’d heard the elf’s voice, or he’d _thought_ he had, but it could have been the last remnants of the Fade clinging to his mind. All those minutes and hours lost tallied up in his head – what if he looked around himself now and found bloodstained silver-white hair, a charred hand with its lyrium tattoos still bright, empty green eyes with the golden light in them extinguished? 

“Mage,” the voice – _Fenris_ – said again, and then an arm slipped hesitantly around his shoulders, delicate fingertips gripping the muscle as if it could anchor him. “It was a dream.” 

“The dark,” Anders mumbled. His breath snarled in his throat as he tried to take a deep breath to calm himself and to force Justice from a thunder back to a low murmur. The spirit showed no signs of being pacified, though – Anders was sure he was in control, and yet Justice was keeping up his litany against the templars; if the spirit had had teeth, Anders was sure he would have been able to hear them gnashing. “Are you all right? I didn’t… do anything?” 

Fenris’s fingers gave his shoulder a final squeeze, and then his hand slipped down to Anders’s back, stroking it through the thin fabric of his shirt. He must have been able to feel the scars, but when Anders scanned his face for a sign of disgust, he found nothing but concern and tiredness. 

“Other than waking me and Soporatus up, no, you didn’t,” Fenris replied. “Though waking that cat up is quite a feat. I’m sure my neighbors are contacting the City Guard as we speak to complain about the noise.” 

“I’m sorry.” He ground the heels of his hands against his closed eyes, but even the darkness behind his eyelids was too much. Justice’s muttering grew louder. “Maybe I should go back to the clinic.” Fenris made a huffy noise that Anders took as a protest. “Justice is… excited,” he explained. “At least I could channel that into some work on my… uh, papers.” 

The blue had leached away as he’d reclaimed some control from Justice, but now it was replaced by the gleam from Fenris’s markings as they flared to life. The chime of lyrium filled his ears, louder than normal – maybe he was hearing it as Justice would have – a throbbing clamor of bells, with something like the faint thump of a heartbeat running through it. He felt himself leaning toward Fenris, as if to hear the lyrium’s song more clearly, and Fenris eased them both slowly down onto the mattress, Anders’s head resting on the smooth, firm muscle of his shoulder. The Fade seemed to reach through Fenris, tickling Anders’s skin, and soon the lullaby of the lyrium soothed him back into sleep. This time, the only nightmares the Fade brought were those of what would happen when the letter they had written reached Fenris’s sister in Qarinus. 

  
And now those nightmares threatened to become reality. Swallowing hard, Anders made himself scan the pages in front of him, trying to prepare himself for any shock so it wouldn’t be fresh when he read it out loud to Fenris. 

“She seems a bit skeptical, but she is stopping in Kirkwall on her way to Val Chevin,” he said, forcing himself not to look up at Fenris, not to see the effect Varania’s words were having on him, the flash of hope. “She says she’s not working for Master Ahriman anymore but is an apprentice to a tailor in Minrathous, who’s sending her to Orlais for plaideweave – Maker’s knob, she should leave _that_ in Orlais.” 

“When will she arrive?” Fenris asked, impatience fissuring his voice. 

“In the next few days,” Anders replied, vaguely impressed that he could force anything past the rapidly expanding lump in his throat. “She will be staying at the Hanged Man, poor woman.” He folded up the pages and handed them back to Fenris, pasting a smile on his face. 

Fenris was giving him that wide-eyed, pleading look that Anders had come to know too well and dread as much as he anticipated it, the one that turned his spine to jelly and made any resolve he might have had melt away like Silverite in a forge-fire. “You’ll come with me, won’t you? I know you owe me no favors, but I would prefer to have someone who can fight to watch my back.” 

“So you _do_ suspect a trap? You think Danarius is part of it? Has he gone into tailoring?” Anders asked. 

The half-hearted joke at least had the benefit of transforming the beseeching, puppy-faced look into a quick glare. “The more it seems that he isn’t a part of it, the more certain I become that he is,” Fenris replied. 

“Ah, paranoia. I’m sure I have a potion for that somewhere,” Anders said. “Look, Fenris, it doesn’t matter if you owe me a favor or not. If you want my help, you’ll have it. Name the day, and we’ll go to the Hanged Man. I’ll just have to remember not to wear my good boots.” 

For a moment, the relieved smile Fenris gave him was almost enough to calm the churning of his stomach and silence the voice that kept reminding him that he was going to be alone again.


	19. Chapter 19

A storm should have been breaking over the city. Waves should have been hurling themselves against the sheer seawalls outside of his clinic; the staircase from Hightown should have been a waterfall of rainwater; they should have been slogging through the flooded alleys of Lowtown knee-deep in filthy water studded with flotillas of empty wine bottles, torn trousers, and lost moldy ragdolls. Anders could feel that uneasiness that should have heralded a storm, the reminder that the ground beneath one’s feet was perhaps not as steady as one would have liked. But instead the heat held fast, and even Fenris’s palm was slippery with sweat when Anders brushed his finger over it, though that was probably less to do with the weather than with nervousness. Still, he traced the markings on Fenris’s hand with a fingertip, the same slow, gentle curling and uncurling motion he’d seen Fenris use on himself. He’d thought it had been some kind of self-soothing gesture – which Anders didn’t understand; in a way, he’d never wanted to be soothed, wanted his wounds to stay raw and angry and _visible_ , as if comfort would somehow make him forget past anguish. But now he wondered if it weren’t a kind of reassurance, an affirmation that Fenris was still alive, that he could still feel, even if it was just the burn of the markings. That Anders _could_ understand – how many times in the tower had he sat and listened to the watery tattoo of his heart, just to remind himself that it _was_ , in fact, still beating.

“We can still turn back,” he murmured as they stood under the Hanged Man. The air was so still and heavy that the effigy didn’t even creak in the breeze – it simply spun languidly on its chain like a lazy spider on its thread of silk. 

“No,” Fenris said in that flat voice that Anders had come to learn meant that the elf had made a decision – whether he liked it or not – and was not going to waver. Anders pressed his lips together to keep from smiling – he’d somehow deciphered the degrees of flatness in Fenris’s voice and what each one meant, though it was sometimes like running his hands over boards to figure out which had been planed the best. Fenris’s hand quivered in his, a brief jolting tremor, and then went still. “There comes a time when you must stop running and turn and face the tiger.” 

“A tiger? Are you expecting your sister to be _that_ intimidating?” Anders asked, knowing he must have sounded flippant, especially to Fenris’s sensitive ears. He rubbed the pad of his thumb over the heel of Fenris’s hand and along the inside of his wrist – sometimes he felt like he was soothing wounds away when he touched Fenris, albeit they were wounds he potentially inflicted with his thoughtlessness, and he remembered being a child and having his mother kiss his cuts and scrapes, as if the loving touch of soft lips or the brush of a thumb over tender skin could heal like magic or medicine. When he was a child, he had believed it could. Fenris’s pulse tapped against the thin skin of his wrist like a baby bird hitting its egg tooth against the shell to hatch. “Luckily, I _am_ a cat person.” 

“It is not my sister I am thinking of,” Fenris said, though Anders would have wagered the button in the clinic’s donation box that at least some of the tremble in Fenris’s voice was because of her. Fear of the unknown, Anders supposed, but worse than that – fear of an unknown that knew you. 

“Well, hopefully there will be no tigers involved, and we’ll just have a drink and a laugh, and the two of you can cry and hug or whatever it is long-lost siblings do,” Anders said. _And then we can go back to your mansion, and she can fuck off to Orlais_ , he finished in his head, trying to smile as if Fenris could read the selfish thoughts on his face. Justice certainly seemed unimpressed by them, a distant, disappointed _harrumph_ drifting through Anders’s mind. 

Fenris gave him an apprehensive, almost stricken look, dark brows knitted together, tiny parallel creases appearing between them. He looked particularly spiky that morning – metal in the shape of raven feathers edged his vambraces and curved upward from his pauldrons, as if he were a keep surrounded in rows of pikes to ward off invaders – but Anders could also see he’d taken special care with his appearance. Fenris’s hair gleamed in the early sun with the pale luster of a pearl, and that clean, herbaceous scent wafted from it when he moved. It was the same combination of attraction and repulsion that he always carried, only heightened. Anders knew that now, at least, it wasn’t directed at him, that Fenris might not have even been aware of it. He wondered if it was left over from Fenris’s days as a slave, that he repeated the same forms over and over even when free – like repeating the same movements when learning the sword compared to actually fighting an opponent with it. Fenris had mentioned that Danarius had made him wear gold chains when he’d been the magister’s bodyguard, and Anders could imagine the allure of Fenris’s lithe body, the gold of the chains sunlight to the moonlight of his hair and markings, combined with the implicit threat of those same markings. He often found himself casting spells in certain ways, gesturing with his staff in a particular movement that he knew he’d learned at the Circle, and told himself that it was simply the most convenient way of doing things. Maybe they were both slaves to their pasts, mistaking unconscious habits for conscious choice. 

Anders smoothed away the faint lines between Fenris’s eyebrows with his fingertip. “Come on then. I’m looking forward to hearing all the embarrassing stories from your childhood.” 

The Hanged Man was a crucible of stench, as if all the worst smells had been drawn from the wood of the building and forged into one solid wall of foul odor. The tavern was emptier than usual, just a few die-hard regulars teetering drunkenly on the periphery or sitting facedown at the rickety tables. Anders spotted her immediately – a lone elven woman at the head of a long, empty table, staring off into the middle distance with her slim, pale hands clasped before her. As they approached, Anders could see the rounded-forward slump of her shoulders, how she vibrated with tension like a struck drumskin. 

She both did and did not look like Fenris. Her hair flared like a cut carnelian in the drab room, red as the bloodstains on the floor behind her and red as the paint on the table before her meant to conceal more bloodstains. Her face was at once coarser and finer than Fenris’s – mouth narrow and prim in comparison to the voluptuousness of her brother’s, her nose bold while his was more delicate. But the eyes... The eyes were the same, green and bitter as a tongue-curling herb, banded with a thick, dark limbal ring as if to contain the brilliance of the green. 

She spoke before they reached the table, never looking in their direction, and her voice was low and burnished like her brother’s, though hers sounded bruised somehow, whereas Fenris’s always reminded Anders of a cut made with a blunt knife, harsh and ragged-edged. 

“It really is you,” she said. It sounded like a sob forced through a tight throat, and yet her face was blank, still, eyes staring straight ahead. 

Fenris’s footsteps lagged, then stopped, Anders taking a few more steps toward the table before realizing that Fenris wasn’t following. He glanced back over his shoulder at the elf and saw… someone who was not Fenris. Or was barely Fenris, as if Fenris had been a costume donned for a fancy dress ball. Whoever this was had more expression on his face than Anders had ever seen on Fenris’s, his black eyebrows pinched together, arching up his forehead. 

“Varania?” The pained voice was Fenris’s, but even it was different, not the slate-like flatness he was used to, but something filled with light and shadow. Her name seemed to fit in his mouth in a way that it hadn’t before, the syllables fluid, well-practiced, familiar. “I… I remember you. We played in our master’s courtyard while Mother worked. You called me….” He looked almost fond as he trailed off, eyes gathered at the corners with a smile, his face suffused with a warmth that Anders had never thought to see on him, as if he were a marble statue metamorphosing into the living flesh it had been modeled on. 

Varania stood, an abrupt movement, and even with her profile toward them, Anders could see that her face lacked all the expression that her brother’s had suddenly regained. “Leto,” she finished. _Leto_ , Anders thought, _is that who this is? Is that who he is going to be now?_ A sense of loss – or just the dread of loss, perhaps – congealed in the pit of his stomach. He’d learned Fenris’s sarcasm, his stiff formality, his fleeting, almost imperceptible smiles – would those all be gone? Was Fenris a cloak that could be thrown off? 

“That’s your name,” Varania said, but there was no warmth in it, no hint of shared memories, no tinge of fondness. Anders wondered how his own voice would have sounded if he’d had to give his father that title out loud. Would there be any warmth in it or only recognition? But this was different – his father had given him up to the templars, had renounced him, while Leto had been taken from her. He watched Fenris struggle – arms rising in aborted gestures as if to reach out to her, feet scuffling on the filthy floorboards in her direction but always taking a half-step back again, tiny flickers of movement in which Fenris seemed to be at war with himself. Anders knew that feeling all too well – he’d struggled with it as an apprentice every time Karl had been in the same room, and now… now he was fighting a similar battle to Fenris, wanting to reach for him while knowing that Fenris would rebuff him. 

“I remember,” Fenris breathed, awe tinging his voice. “I remember you and Mother, and….” He bowed his head, and Anders knew the look he was giving Varania, that beseeching one that she must have seen often when they were children. “How is Mother?” he asked, his voice small, as if it had been folding onto itself again and again, the way he’d folded Varania’s letter over and over. 

“She died in the Teraevyn alienage,” Varania replied. “We had no way of supporting ourselves in Minrathous.” She was still not looking at Fenris, but Anders heard anger in her voice, a low, tight thrum of rage that broke the surface slowly, as if it had been contained and held onto for years. “I went to back to Minrathous after she died. I saw you once in the street there, Leto, with Dan—with your master, wearing your sword and your golden chains, but you didn’t know me.” 

Fenris’s nose wrinkled, his upper lip pulling away from his teeth into a snarl. “He is not my master!” 

Anders should have known then – he should have known before, that hint of clean ozone hanging incongruously in the hot, fetid air of the tavern, but he’d put it out of his mind, written it off to a leaking potion bottle in his belt pouch or a whiff coming off of Fenris’s tattoos. Now, though, he could smell the sickly undertone of it, lyrium ingested and oozing out through pores, mixing with pungent perfumes and rancid body oil. Even in the Deep Roads, he wasn’t sure he had ever smelled anything so corrupted. He glanced around the tavern, at the bartender looking studiously away, at the regulars nodding obliviously over their mugs of ale. Justice rose in him, sharpening his senses – Justice, he was sure, rather than Vengeance; he recognized that coldness, almost distance, that sealed him off from fear. 

From somewhere above, he heard the faint toll of armor clinking against armor. Anders glanced toward Fenris, hoping to find some confirmation, but the elf was fixed on his sister, waiting for a reply that she seemed unwilling to offer. 

“Fenris, we need to go. Now!” he said, grabbing Fenris’s gauntleted wrist, ready to tug him toward the door. 

But another voice drowned his out, to Fenris’s ears, he was sure, if no one else’s – one cloyingly sweet, like an intricate tower of candied fruit left to molder in an abandoned mansion, the banquet it was meant for never taking place. 

“I will always be your master, my little Fenris,” it said, self-satisfied as a snake curled up on a warm rock after swallowing a baby mouse whole. 

Fenris whirled around in the direction of the voice. Even if he hadn’t heard the words it had spoken, his expression would have told Anders who it was – his eyes widened until they seemed about to swallow his face, full of fear, disbelief, and, worst of all, a tiny glint of hope. A lesser man would have been standing in a puddle of his own water, and for a moment, Fenris’s face went slack, as if he were doing just that, and Anders wished that he were strong enough to tuck the elf under his arm and run out of the Hanged Man, run out of Kirkwall, never stop running. He forced himself to look away from Fenris, from that face he thought he’d known but that now seemed to have been a disguise all along – a hard, unmoving mask that hid this scared, passive creature behind it – and glanced over his shoulder. 

Danarius minced down the stairs from the second floor, hands clasped in front of him as if he were meeting foreign diplomats at the Winter Palace instead of ambushing his former slave in a tavern that reeked of piss. The guards flanking him wore masks, their eyes black holes, and yet Danarius’s gray eyes somehow managed to appear even emptier than theirs, mirrors that reflected nothing. The magister’s gaze was focused on Fenris, his face as pitiless as a raptor hunting a rabbit. 

Anders’s stomach plunged, not just because they were so obviously outnumbered. It had been a trick all along; there had never been a tailor in Qarinus or any fucking plaideweave in Orlais – Varania had never had any intention of reuniting with her brother for his sake or her own. The odor of scorched wood and hay suddenly coated his nostrils, as if he were being betrayed by his father all over again in the leaping light from the flames of the burning barn. A bolt of electricity crackled into his hands, ready to be launched, and he wasn’t certain if he would have aimed at Danarius or Varania. Fenris had been right about facing the tiger, even if he hadn’t known which tiger it would be – if his own sister had given him up to his former master, there could be no peace anywhere. 

“I knew you would turn up eventually, my pet,” the magister cooed. “You are predictable as always.” 

Anders swung his gaze toward Fenris, expecting to see the elf bristling at the condescension in Danarius’s voice, the insult to everything that Fenris had fought for in the years since he’d escaped, but he saw only that same helpless, paralyzed expression, the look of a man staring down death itself. Or worse, death offering an antidote to itself. 

“I’m sorry it came to this, Leto,” Varania murmured into that horrible silence that stretched and stretched, and she finally raised her eyes to look at her brother, though her head was still bowed. Anders was sure the bow of her head was not for Fenris, but for Danarius, the habits of a slave as engrained in her as they had been – and still were – in Fenris. 

Her voice, the low, sad regret that pulsed through it like a drumbeat, seemed to call Fenris back from the abyss he’d been staring into, and he whipped his head to glare at her, rage twisting his face. It was a welcome sight to Anders, who had been on the receiving end of that look many times, familiar at least. 

“Save me your apologies,” he spat. “You led him here! Your remorse comes too late.” 

Danarius clicked his tongue, as if Fenris were a puppy who had just pissed on the rug – it had the same air of indulgent disappointment that would turn quickly to cold anger if the mistake were repeated. “Now, now, Fenris, don’t blame your sister. She did what any good Imperial citizen should and has done the Magisterium a great service by helping me to retrieve my investment.” 

“I never wanted these filthy markings, Danarius!” Fenris said, gesturing at the lyrium twining over his biceps with a flick of his wrist, as if he could brush them away like dust. The fury he had been saving for Varania finally turned toward its rightful source, the rich red wine sound of his voice souring into vinegar. “But I won’t let you kill me to get them.” 

“Oh, how little you know, my pet,” Danarius said. His chuckle made Anders feel as if unwanted fingers were trailing along his spine, clammy and vaguely threatening. The magister turned his flat, empty silver gaze on him, and Anders had to struggle to keep himself from taking a step backward – the man somehow managed to be more repugnant than a Broodmother. “And this is your new master then?” He eyed the staff clutched in Anders’s hand and must have been able to sense the barrier spell that Anders was ready to cast. “So you ran from one mage to another? Though he does look a bit shabby, don’t you think?” The very tips of Danarius’s languid, desiccated fingers brushed the ragged feathers on Anders’s pauldron, and the man chuckled again, deeper in his throat now, more confident. “I doubt he can keep you in the luxury to which you became accustomed in my household.” 

“I am not his master!” Anders said. He was sure that Danarius was a powerful mage, but he was still just a man, albeit a repulsive one, and all men could be killed. Or most of them could. Whether the magister died with his heart in Fenris’s fist or scorched by Anders’s flames, he _would_ die. From the back of his mind, Justice seemed to murmur in agreement. “Fenris is a free man.” 

“Do I detect a note of jealousy?” Another laugh, though this one seemed somehow awkward, uneasy, and Anders felt an echo of that unease – unease that he _was_ jealous that this man had had Fenris’s loyalty, maybe his admiration, his… but no, it hadn’t been by choice; it hadn’t been _earned_. He told himself that he wouldn’t have wanted it, any of it, that way, at that price. _But would you have refused it?_

“It’s not surprising,” Danarius went on. “The lad is rather skilled, isn’t he?” Closer up, Anders could see that his eyes were clouded like a corpse’s, set in bruised hollows, as if he were succumbing to the Blight sickness. His face was fissured with wrinkles, crisscrossed with faint scars that pulled tight on his sunken cheeks. It was as if the man’s flesh had fled, leaving his skin to cling desperately to the bone. “I am a reasonable man, though. If you give him to me, I would see that you were well-compensated. More gold than you could ever spend perhaps?” 

Anders could almost feel Justice cocking his ear to listen now, grumbling about the good that could be done with the wealth Danarius was offering, and he tried to pinch out Justice’s arguments like a flame snuffed out between wet fingertips. _No_ , he thought, _slavery is injustice. You know this. It’s no better than what the mages suffer in the Gallows. Or not_ much _better_. Justice seemed to ponder this, drawing back, Vengeance seeping into his muttering about mages and templars, and Anders thought he had won the argument until Justice said, _The needs of the many outweigh one life. The mages of Kirkwall need us, as do the poor and downtrodden of this city. How long have we struggled to help them from a lack of means?_ He felt Justice surge, that rush that he imagined was like falling from a great height and seeing the ground rise up to meet you right before you hit it, and he desperately tried to hold the spirit back. 

“Or, if you truly cannot bear to be parted from him,” Danarius was saying, “perhaps you could come to Minrathous as my apprentice.” Varania let out a soft, shocked gasp at this, but when Anders glanced her way, her head was bowed again, eyes fixed on the floor. “The power of the Imperium would be at your disposal. Of course, he won’t be the Fenris you knew, but that hardly matters.” The man turned a leer on Fenris, a smirk that tugged at the lines webbing his sallow face. 

“Shut your mouth, Danarius!” Fenris shouted, his markings flaring, turning the tips of his white hair to blue fire. 

Danarius let out an angry sigh, almost a hiss, like an offended cat, and snapped, “The word is ‘master’.” He turned back to Anders, impatience creeping into the bland, pleasant expression he’d been maintaining. “So, I’ve given you two very generous offers. Far more generous than someone in possession of stolen property deserves. What do you say?” 

Justice found an unlikely ally in the man Anders used to be, the Anders who had dreamed of the Imperium, of being valued – famed, even – for his magical abilities, rather than feared and hated. The Anders who didn’t care all that much _how_ he got someone he found attractive into his bed as long as he did. In spite of the endless warnings of the templars, First Enchanter Irving, and all the senior mages at the Circle, Anders had never been tempted by the voices of demons – it smacked too much of blood magic to him. Yet now, faced with a deal offered by a dead-eyed creature in exchange for blood – though not _his_ blood – he understood for the first time _why_ mages would succumb. 

He could feel Fenris staring at him, that imploring look warring with anger at Danarius, at Varania, at Anders for hesitating even a moment. Hadn’t he felt that fury too, combined as it was with gratitude? Hadn’t he thanked the templars who brought his weevil-filled bread from time to time and meant it, while still being willing to destroy them with magic if he’d been able to? Danarius may have been a mage, but he knew nothing of deprivation, of having no say in his own life. Fenris did. 

“I….” Anders trailed off. His vision grayed at the edges as if he were sinking into unconsciousness, and yet he knew that it was Justice, blocking him out like a piece of cloth draped over a birdcage to cut off the squawking of the bird inside. 

“No,” Fenris said, his voice rough, nearly a growl – he sounded almost as feral as Anders had once accused him of being. “He needs to die!” 

Fenris’s anger, frayed as it was, was like a rope thrown to a drowning man – Anders caught hold of it, pulling himself against the whirling current of Justice, back up to the surface of his own mind. In his head, he bargained desperately with the spirit. _We can still help the people of Kirkwall without this, but if we do not save Fenris now, he will have nothing. All he has fought to become will be stripped from him. If he is taken, everything that makes him Fenris will be gone. All of his memories of him_ – of us – _will be wiped away. We will be forgotten._

“You weren’t always this way, Fenris,” Danarius said. “Once upon a time, you had affection for me. I remember it fondly.” But the terseness of his voice sounded anything but fond, all of the indulgence in it picked clean. 

Jealousy and blind rage flooded into the maelstrom, and it dragged Anders under, though now he recognized it – _Vengeance_. Justice joined his voice to Vengeance’s, and he let them both take him. 

“For freedom!” he cried in a voice that both was and was not his, and the guards flanking Danarius went up like fireworks on Satinalia. 

  
Anders saw the fight in glimpses, as if he were being ducked in a bucket of filthy water in the dungeon at Kinloch Hold by an armored hand tangled in his hair. Everything was murky, dark, hazy, with brief moments of clarity: Fenris a cyclone of blue light, cutting slavers down with his enormous blade that he should have been barely able to lift and yet wielded as if it were another limb; Varania cowering in the corner, looking, with her red hair and green dress, like a poppy trembling in the wind; Danarius safe inside the swirling magic of his barrier as his men died by the dozen. 

All Anders knew was that whoever he faced – man, corpse, or demon – fell before him, if they fell at all – slavers exploded into motes of bloody dust, rage demons froze and shattered, corpses burnt to piles of greasy ash that slipped between the floorboards. Even as he dealt out destruction, Anders – he was sure it was the particle of him that still had some control – cast healing spell after healing spell on Fenris. Justice, or Vengeance, never seemed to run out of mana the way Anders would have, and for that, at least, he was thankful, as Danarius replaced his all-too-mortal slavers with wave after wave of demons, shades, and corpses. 

And then there was only Danarius, doubled over and panting, at the foot of the stairs. Vengeance, apparently satisfied, retreated, and Anders wilted at the knees, grabbing hold of the back of a wobbly chair to keep himself upright, blinking the stinging sweat out of his eyes as he watched Fenris stalk over to the wounded magister. He grabbed Danarius by the throat, the man’s pained gurgle echoing in the tavern, and hoisted him high into the air, the blue nimbus of his markings still cloaking him. Their light picked out the deep furrows between his brows, caught on the glisten of saliva on his bared teeth. 

“You are no longer my master,” Fenris rasped, voice like a file dragged across iron. 

The magister had no time to respond, no angry hiss or disappointed click of the tongue – with a sickening _pop_ , Fenris snapped his neck, slashing it open with the claws of his gauntlets, and dropped him to the floor. Danarius’s blood sprayed from his throat into the air like a cloud of shining red bees, and he gave a final, feeble gasp before lying still. But what Anders saw most clearly through the gauzy veil of exhaustion was the change in Fenris’s posture – the hunched shoulders were gone as he stood over the sputtering body of his former master, staring down at it like a piece of filth from the Darktown sewers that had squelched through his bare toes. When killing, Fenris had always seemed to Anders to be somewhat brutally efficient, no wasted movements, but when he’d slashed Danarius’s throat, he’d done it with a flare of his gauntlet, a backward stagger as he’d let Danarius fall from his grasp. _He is free_. 

Anders stumbled toward Fenris as the elf turned toward his sister, who flinched away from him like a spooked halla. Her eyes were sad now instead of angry, her resemblance to Fenris disappearing. “I had no choice, Leto,” she said, still in that grave, slow voice that didn’t betray the panic that her cowering and her trembling hands revealed. 

“Stop calling me that!” Fenris spat, and Anders felt a kind of shameful relief, that fear of Fenris somehow un-becoming himself, reverting back to who he’d been, unclenching within his gut and leaching out of him. Perhaps Fenris would become someone else, remake himself to his own liking, but whoever that might be, at least Anders would know him from the beginning. 

Fenris’s markings cast their blue glow over Varania’s face as he advanced on her, and she shuffled backward away from him until her back was pressed against the rough, blood-spattered stone of the wall. 

“Please, don’t do this,” she cried, desperate for the first time. She looked past Fenris at Anders, the fear in her wide eyes echoing that in her brother’s not long before, when his former master had appeared at the top of the stairs – his former master who had been led to him by his own sister’s connivance. “Tell him to stop,” she called to Anders, her voice sounding on the brink of a scream. 

“Fenris wouldn’t listen to me if I told him to pour water on himself when he was on fire,” Anders replied, resting heavily on his staff. 

Fenris took another step toward her, and she shrank before him, as if willing herself to be small enough to slip through the floorboards at her feet. Vengeance came rushing back, that protective yet destructive force that had once been his friend, but was now more like having a half-tame bear as a pet – yes, it would destroy your enemies, but how long before its claws were slashing through your throat? He tightened his grip on his staff, drawing on the surge of energy from Vengeance even as he wrestled with the spirit. _The demon_ , a voice that sounded far too much like Fenris for his liking whispered. 

Anders sighed. “Fenris, wait.” 

To his surprise, Fenris stopped, back stiffening, his head half-turning toward Anders as if listening, though when Anders spoke, it was to Varania. “I’m not doing this for you.” He dragged himself a few steps toward Fenris, close enough to run his fingertip along Fenris’s spine through the gap in his armor if he reached out. “Don’t kill her, Fenris.” 

Fenris turned his glare on Anders then, his mouth screwed up as if he were tasting something sour. “Why not?” he asked, each word bitten off. “She was willing to see me killed! She’s not one of your sad Circle mages. She’s just one more tool of the magisters!” 

Anders wondered what he would have done if his father had walked into the Hanged Man at that moment – after all, was what his father had done so very different from Varania bringing Danarius down on Fenris’s head? “We should hear her out, at least,” he suggested, still puzzling over whether he would have given his father the same opportunity. No, he decided. His father had looked into the face of a child – _his_ child – and denied him, handing him over happily to the templars, who existed only to make that child learn to deny himself. “She’s your sister,” he said, the hypocrisy of it squirming in his stomach. “Your only family. And she was a slave too, just like you were. Maybe she can explain herself somehow.” 

He could see Fenris’s upper lip curl, thinning the fullness of it. Fenris turned back toward his sister, looming over her now, but he’d let his markings wink out. 

“I have a room upstairs,” Varania said, stuttering in her haste. “We can speak there. Please.” 

Without a word, Fenris turned on his heel and headed past the corpse of his master toward the stairs. Varania hurried after him, and Anders managed to follow, using his staff as a walking stick to negotiate the steps. 

Varania’s room was small and, set above the kitchen, stank of Corff’s rancid stews and vapors from the cheap alcohol below. She sat on the low, uneven stool, leaving Anders and Fenris to take the narrow bed, sitting awkwardly next to one another as if they were children who had broken a rule and she were their mother ready to give them a scolding. 

Fenris had crossed his arms over his chest, and the impatient tap of his fingerguard against his vambrace was like the incessant drip of water in the dungeon of Kinloch Hold – Anders had to keep himself from flinching at every _tap_ , the sound making an itch start up between his shoulder blades. 

“So, explain,” Fenris ordered. 

Varania wrung her hands, then clasped them together and stuck them between her knees to still them. She looked up at Fenris from under her fine red brows, and the pleading look in her green eyes was nearly identical to one that Anders had seen on Fenris’s face before. “He was going to make me his apprentice. I would have been a magister.” 

Realization, like cold water poured down the back of his coat, washed over Anders. _She’s a_ mage. _All along, through all those complaints about magic ruining his life, his_ sister _has been a bloody mage!_ The feathers of his pauldron had been brushing the metal ones of Fenris’s, and he twitched his shoulder away and edged a few inches away from Fenris. Not that the elf noticed – he was glaring at his sister with narrowed eyes, his brows furrowed together until they almost met. 

“You sold out your own brother to become a magister?” he demanded, punctuating his question with a sharp, bitter bark of laughter. “Then you are a fool. You would never be a magister – magisters come from the highest families in the Imperium. Do you really think they’d accept an elf? A former slave?” 

“You have no idea what we went through!” Varania cried, sitting up straighter and, finally, looking Fenris directly in the eyes. “We lived with half a dozen other families in that tiny house in the Alienage, living and dying on top of each other, locked in at night. All the jobs we could have gotten were taken by slaves. And all the while, you were in Minrathous, in your master’s summer pavilion, posing and preening for the magisters. But this… this was my only chance at a life better than what I had!” 

The Fade fluttered against Anders’s skin as light poured into Fenris’s markings. He felt himself drawn by it, leaning back toward Fenris, even as he readied the magic to throw up a barrier between him and Varania. 

“And now you have no chance at all,” Fenris said through clenched teeth. Anders could see the knot of tension tight at the corner of his jaw. “You have nowhere else to go. Your master is dead. No other magister in Tevinter will take you on after this. The rest of Thedas thinks elves should be confined to Alienages or sent to work in whorehouses. You have truly chosen your own path, _sister_ , in a way that I was never allowed to.” 

Varania cocked her head to one side as she looked at her brother, her bright hair and blank eyes reminding Anders of an exotic bird. “Do you think I have not already experienced all of that? That perhaps that was exactly _why_ I took Danarius’s offer? I have already suffered the worst that this world holds for the elvhen.” 

“She could stay here,” Anders suggested slowly. He already dreaded Fenris’s response, but he couldn’t refuse to help a fellow mage, especially not one who _wanted_ to learn. He’d known both Circle life and whorehouses, and couldn’t wish either on anyone, even someone who had done what Varania had. Identical green glares fixed on him, and he flinched. “I could use some help in the clinic, and even though I’m no magister, I _did_ have training at the Circle. And she could—” 

Fenris’s voice was as crisp as a pair of sharp scissors cutting through paper. “Surely Lirene doesn’t have room for any more elvhen strays.” 

Anders let out an incredulous gulp of laughter. “You live in a mostly empty mansion!” He pressed his fingertips against his brow – too many possibilities were spinning through his head like flotsam caught in a whirlpool. What if Fenris had known all along that Varania was a mage? What if he had gotten the markings because he couldn’t bear the thought of his sister being more powerful than him? He had always claimed to not remember anything more than brief, random glimpses of his past, but…. “Danarius is dead. Hadriana is dead. You are free, and you have a chance to build a new life with your sister. Why wouldn’t you?” 

“Why _would_ I?” Fenris asked. “Why would I want a life with someone I couldn’t trust? Someone who was willing to bargain my life – my memory, my free will – in exchange for power?” His voice had gotten lower, as if meant for Anders alone, and through the hurt in it, Anders thought he could discern something like a warning, a warning that might have already come too late. He forced himself to meet Fenris’s eyes, and when he did, it felt as if his heart had been drained of blood, heartstrings pulled free, valves swinging like doors in a recently vacated house. 

Varania stood, the wobble of the stool cutting through the silence that had sprung up like a wall of thorns between Anders and Fenris. “Any family connection between us was cut long ago, Fenris,” she said, the name seeming heavy on her tongue, a conscious choice. “You said you didn’t ask for this, but that’s not true. You wanted it. You competed for it. When you won, you used the boon to have Mother and me freed.” 

Fenris turned to look at her, leaving Anders to slump back against the wall like a pillow with its feathers leaking out. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked in a choked voice that made Anders’s throat constrict as if in sympathy. 

The bitterness had blossomed again in Varania’s eyes, a spiked and poisonous bloom, as she looked down at Fenris. “Freedom was no boon for me or for Mother.” Her hand rose like an ascending dove, fingers coming close to brushing the pale hair at Fenris’s temple before jerking away again. “I look on you now, and I think you got the better end of the bargain.” 

“I didn’t know,” Fenris murmured. “I thought it was right – at least _some_ of us would be free….” 

“And in the meantime, you would be feared, desired, petted and cooed over,” Varania said, a faint, sad smile tingeing her dark lips. “You always did think you were special.” 

Fenris rose, a smooth, silent movement like a cat stretching, and looked down into his sister’s pale, hollowed face, his eyes tight with what could have been anger or tenderness. She didn’t shrink from him as much now, though whether it was because she no longer feared him or because she no longer feared _anything_ , Anders couldn’t tell. 

“I would have given you everything,” he whispered, the words thick with sadness yet redolent with past affection. Though they weren’t directed at him, Anders felt those words like a caress, a tiptoeing of fingers up the back of his neck. Jealousy burned like acid in his throat, his stomach – if he could turn himself inside out, he would find it etching swirling tendrils like Fenris’s markings into his viscera, curving and entwining around his heart. 

Then Fenris turned away from his sister, head bowed, a fall of white hair concealing his face from Anders’s eyes. Varania stared at him for a long moment, and then gathered her small satchel from the table and left the room without another word. 

At least a dozen times, Anders opened his mouth to speak but then snapped it shut again. Sometimes, he got as far as forming a word, but every time it died with a faint squeak and dissipated into the stale air of the room. Fenris was like a porcelain statue that had fallen from a small height, not yet shattered, but fissured with cracks, ready to crumble into pieces at even a too-strong gust of wind, and Anders felt like a gale. 

“I thought discovering my past would bring a sense of belonging, but I was wrong,” Fenris murmured. “Magic has tainted that too. There is nothing for me to reclaim.” He turned his face farther away from Anders, muffling his words, but Anders could still hear the bitterness in them, sharp and fresh again, untempered even by sadness. “I am alone.” 

It was a frank pronouncement, stark, bare, and Anders’s first instinct was to argue against it, to say that Fenris wasn’t alone as long as _he_ was there, but instead he blurted, “Your sister’s selfishness has nothing to do with magic.” 

That at least got Fenris to look at him, albeit with a glare. “No? Greed for it didn’t bring Danarius here? Didn’t make my sister betray me?” 

Anders looked down at his staff where it rested across his lap, his fingers running over wood that had been smoothed by the grip of his hands. “No. I mean, yes, it _was_ greed, but it could have been for anything. If Danarius had offered her a villa on the Nocen Sea to betray you, she would have taken it. You have done everything for your freedom, but Varania has done everything for her own security. In that way, she is as much of a victim as you have been.” 

One of Fenris’s eyebrows arched upward until it disappeared beneath his pale fringe, but the dubiousness was short-lived, hardening quickly into anger. “Of course you would defend her!” he snapped. “Even after….” he trailed off, brushing a hand over his face, as if he could wipe away the blush that was rising in his cheeks. “I was a fool to ever trust _any_ mage.” 

The words were like a tide, sucking the sand out from under Anders’s feet and back out to sea as he stood on the shore – all the trust he’d built up with Fenris, the camaraderie, the affection, trickling inexorably away grain by grain. He tried to swallow around the lump growing in his throat and almost gagged. “I’m not defending her. I’m just saying that mages don’t have the monopoly on betrayal. I haven’t betrayed you, have I?” 

“How do I know that?” Fenris demanded. He started his familiar stalk up and down the cramped room, as if his anger had finally filled him to the point that he had to move to make it dissipate, pound it out of his body through the bottoms of his bare feet. “How do I know your _associates_ didn’t know the truth about Varania? They somehow found her in Minrathous after all.” 

“They did what _you_ asked!” Anders protested. He could feel some of the fight coming back into him now, maybe because he had nothing left to lose, no need to pussyfoot around Fenris’s capricious moods. “And if I had betrayed you, do you think I’d be standing here covered in blood and scoria? I’d be on the fucking boat to Minrathous or rolling naked in a pile of sovereigns!” 

“If it wasn’t this, it will be something else.” Fenris stopped suddenly and stared down at him, and in spite of himself, Anders felt that pull, that urge to throw his arms around Fenris’s slim waist, and listen to the lyrium hum to him. Instead, he clenched his hands around his staff until the wood creaked in his grip. “What is it, mage? What would make you turn on me?” 

Anders licked his lips – they were chapped to the point of cracking, as if he’d been walking across the Anderfels without a waterskin – hoping to buy himself a few moments. He needed to sort Justice’s rumbled reminders that mages’ rights were more important than Fenris, more important than Anders’s own life, from his own loneliness, his confused enjoyment of the elf’s company, the ache of desire he felt every time he even thought of Fenris. 

But even that brief pause was too long – Fenris’s eyes narrowed, the green of them almost disappearing behind his thick eyelashes, and he sneered, “It must be difficult to choose from so many.” 

“There aren’t any—” Anders began, but he cut himself short. He couldn’t promise that, and suddenly lying to Fenris seemed as bad as an admission. 

“Thank you for your help, mage,” Fenris said, giving him that distant, formal bow that was little more than a jerk of the head, a slight bend at the waist. “I’m sure the innkeeper needs the room back.” 

“Fenris!” Anders called as the door swung shut behind the elf, a beat too late, just as he had been all day, had been for months even. Perhaps years. He leaned his head back against the weathered wood, staring up at the ceiling through a swimming lens of tears. He had never been one to hesitate in the past. If anything, he’d always been _too_ impulsive – making a snap decision to escape over the ice on Lake Calenhad at the beginning of the spring thaw, barely weighing the consequences of merging with Justice before agreeing to it. It had been so much easier to choose when the only person he had to please was himself. But now he’d hesitated once and failed Karl, and then done it again – twice, as he’d wavered over Danarius’s offer – and lost Fenris.


	20. Chapter 20

Danarius’s body probably hadn’t even hit the harbor floor, and already Fenris’s freedom felt like a stinging lash across his back, a rebuke. Before, he had been able to tell himself that he hadn’t been wasting time – he had been waiting for Danarius to find him. But now, even with the magister only a few hours cold, he felt he should be doing something useful with his freedom – perhaps should have been all along. He’d thought freedom would be like a new sword pommel, something to grow accustomed to, build up calluses against, until it felt natural, easy. But this emptiness, this hopelessness, this guilt – he did not see how he could ever become accustomed to any of that. Maybe that was what life was for most people – learning how to forget your mistakes, betrayals, hatreds, distracting yourself so that you weren’t constantly tugging tender scabs off old wounds. Once, he could have asked Anders. The mage would have known better than anyone.

He’d left Anders behind in the Hanged Man and walked, aimlessly at first but then with purpose, to the docks. He wasn’t sure why – the resolve driving his steps remained obscure to him. Perhaps he’d wanted to make certain that Varania boarded a ship back to Minrathous or to ask her more about their mother, if she’d spoken of him at all in the years after they’d been freed – after _he_ ’d won their freedom. Or perhaps he had been hoping to plunge his fist into his sister’s chest and pull out her heart, feel it quiver and then still in his hand like the hatchlings that had fallen from the trees in their master’s garden. But he caught no glimpse of sunshine glinting off red hair at the docks, and he ended up squatting on the end of a stone pier, watching the filthy water of the harbor shift like bodies moving under green silken sheets. Killing her would have brought him no satisfaction – he’d thought finding her would open up a new world, one he’d believed was lost forever. That world was gone, though, and he couldn’t get it back, couldn’t read the tale of it written on the outside of her dead heart. 

The wind rose off the water, buffeting him, almost as if blowing through him, scouring away the anger that had settled in him like sand in a desert ruin. It smelled of brine, faintly bitter, like fresh oyster liquor, the odor that Anders had left on his fingers that night in his storeroom. Fenris squinted against the white glare of the sun off the water, staring at the horizon as if he could see the craggy brown shores of Ferelden across the narrow finger of the Waking Sea. He could go anywhere now, board any of the ships bobbing in the harbor without fear of pursuit. And yet he felt anchored to the dirty, blood-stained stones of Kirkwall, chained to them – but when he glanced down at his ankles, he didn’t picture the heavy golden links that Danarius had made him wear, but something finer, braids of silky blond hair with enough red in it to make it seem always touched by firelight. 

He stood and turned his back on the fitful rocking of the harbor waters, staring at Kirkwall rising on its bluffs before him like a layer cake – the confection of Hightown on top, supported by tiers of filth, dirt, and bones. Even within the city he no longer knew where to go. There was no question of _belonging_ – that would always be beyond him. He’d been roosting in Danarius’s mansion out of spite more than anything, taking it over like a cuckoo chick hatched into the wrong nest, but now there seemed no point to staying there under the scrutiny of the City Guard. The Alienage, cramped, dirty, and miserable, was not an option – while the spreading branches of the Vhenadahl were impressive for having grown from the cursed soil of Kirkwall, he felt no connection to it and obtained no peace from its shade. 

None of it felt like it should, like he’d imagined. He’d thought freedom would be sweet, a drop of honey on his tongue, but it tasted only of ashes, dry, bitter, choking. Without the need to run and fight to stay alive, he should have finally been able to live as a free man… but how _was_ that? He had nothing. No home, no friends, no family. Not even an enemy. All he had was the ever-present burn of his markings, that constant nagging pain that felt like being scratched with a rusty pin from the inside, and his anger. The anger he would have given away – it reminded him too much of Danarius, of the first response always being to kill, like a reflex, like an instinct, because that was what he had been made to do. 

Once, he must have had so much, or as much as a slave could have. Once, he must have brimmed with so much love that he’d been willing to put his body at stake to free those he loved, his mother and Varania. Where had it gone? Why hadn’t it come back with his memories and filled that emptiness? He could remember his mother’s face, the lines that had creased it, the veins of silver that had woven through her black hair, but he couldn’t remember the love he must have felt for her, couldn’t even imagine loving anyone that much. What he _did_ know was that magic had taken those memories from him – maybe even the ability to feel that kind of love – and had left him this twisted, incomplete creature. 

Fenris began to walk, the cries of the gulls growing fainter as he passed the Qunari compound and climbed the steep staircase away from the docks. It was time to move forward, and though he didn’t know where that led, he knew that his future would have to be free of magic. What had magic ever brought him but pain, subjugation, betrayal by his own flesh and blood? He would not take such a taint with him into any new life he might attempt. With new determination, he headed toward Darktown. 

******************

The unlit lantern hung outside Anders’s door like a chrysalis. Perhaps Anders was out, Fenris thought as he stalked past, maybe the mage had stayed at the Hanged Man – would Justice have relented and let him enjoy a cup of rum, a plump handful of a barmaid on his knee? – or maybe he’d tried to seek Fenris out and gone to Hightown. A needling voice, like a splinter under a fingernail, told him that Anders had gone to the docks too, trailing Varania onto a ship bound for Minrathous. As he raised his foot to kick open the clinic door, he thought he felt those invisible golden chains around his ankles snap. 

The door burst open, rebounding with a loud _thunk_ , and swung back toward him, creaking and shuddering. Anders was halfway out of his chair as Fenris stormed through the doorway, one hand already reaching for his staff where it lay on one of the ramshackle cots. That hand dropped when he saw Fenris, the startled anger on his face softening into surprise. Before he could speak, though, Fenris grabbed him by the collar of his coat and threw him against a rough-hewn pillar, pinning him to it. Blue light fissured the mage’s face as his head struck stone, glowing cracks that were quickly sewn shut again as Anders stared down into Fenris’s eyes, his own – golden brown instead of the swirling blue Fenris had expected – wide with shock. 

“Fenris!” Anders breathed. Fenris would have thought that the breath had been knocked from the mage’s lungs, but his voice was tinged with a kind of wonder, as if his throat were tight with awe rather than constricted by the weight of Fenris shoving him back against the pillar. He reached up and cupped Fenris’s face in his slender white hands, seeming oblivious to the clawed gauntlets inches from his neck. 

“I wasn’t sure if you….” Anders trailed off. His eyes flicked back and forth over Fenris’s face, as if he were reading words written there, and his fingertips followed his gaze, running along Fenris’s cheekbones, tracing the outline of his lips, just barely riffling the hair at his temples. “I tried to follow you, but you disappeared, and then I thought….” He swallowed his words again, seeming unwilling to say them, and leaned forward to rest his forehead against Fenris’s. “You’re safe.” 

Fenris’s mouth went dry at the touch, the moisture wicked away along with the anger that had been pulsing in him since the Hanged Man – the wind at the docks hadn’t blown it away as he’d thought, only cooled it. He wondered if cool anger were somehow different – in Anders, at least, it was, an elemental difference. Justice was cold rage, efficient as Fenris tried to be when he fought, but Vengeance – and it _must_ have been Vengeance in control at the Hanged Man – was hot, roiling, vindictive in its brutality. He had seen Danarius’s men peeled like fruit by magic, shrieking until they were finally claimed by shock or blood loss. _For him_. 

And yet here was Anders, pulse fluttering against the smooth, pale skin of his throat, so close to the spiked tip of Fenris’s fingerguard, trembling breath that could be so easily stopped… and his hands. His hands when they touched Fenris now and almost every time before were always exquisitely gentle. Fenris’s own hands tightened on Anders’s collar, clenching until they shook, steel scraping on steel. He jerked Anders toward him and pressed his lips against the mage’s, breathing in the sigh that Anders released at the contact. 

Their lips clung together, the dryness of Fenris’s catching on the dampness of Anders’s, then slipped against each other, and the mage’s parted easily beneath his, his tongue sweeping over Fenris’s. All the anger, fear, relief, hatred that had been brewing in Fenris since the Hanged Man rose in him like a breath ready to be exhaled – a sigh like Anders’s, but longer, dredged up from the depths of his lungs, a miasma that had been building since the day he’d had the lyrium burned into his flesh. He emptied that breath, that tumult of feeling, into the kiss, into Anders, as if the mage were a vessel to be filled. Anders tilted his head, mouth opening wider, as if accepting what Fenris was pouring into him. Fenris felt his heart stutter in his chest, as he’d felt those of so many others falter in his hand, like a candle flame flickering on its wick in a draft. 

Head spinning, he let go of Anders’s collar and ran his hand down the mage’s chest, slicing through the buckles of his coat as he went, pressing just hard enough to cut through the tunic beneath as well. Then his hands left Anders altogether, even as he leaned in to keep their lips from parting, and he unfastened his gauntlets and vambraces, letting them fall to the dirt floor at their feet. Anders gasped into his mouth as Fenris’s bare hands slid over his chest, his nipples hardening against Fenris’s palms. 

Fenris cupped his hands over Anders’s chest, marveling again at being able to elicit such a response with a mere touch – he was so much more used to being taken from rather than giving, to having the pleasure gained from his body have little to do with him, and yet here was Anders’s heart quickening under the heel of his hand until the loose golden strands of hair around his face quivered with its force. As if to be certain, Fenris bowed his head and pressed his lips just under Anders’s jawline, where his pulse churned beneath the warm skin. 

He shoved the mage’s coat and sliced-open tunic down his arms, fingertips ravening each inch of skin he bared. There was so much of Anders he hadn’t seen, hadn’t touched or tasted – the mage was always maddeningly well-covered, even in the lingering heat of the summer – and yet that hunger in him wouldn’t let him linger. He pressed a line of kisses along the trail of caramel-colored hair that started at Anders’s navel and disappeared beneath the waistband of his trousers. The heat of Anders’s erection was warm against his cheek, and he turned his face toward it, inhaling the spicy, musky scent of the mage, the piquancy of his sweat, and beneath it all that smell like grass crushed underfoot on a summer day. 

“Fenris?” 

He looked up at the question in Anders’s voice to find the mage staring down at him, the warm brown of his eyes blurred by the haze of his sandy eyelashes. His fingers rested on the crown of Fenris’s head, undemanding, not pushing his face against his groin, and then began to lightly comb through Fenris’s hair. 

“Are you sure?” Anders asked, then swallowed loudly, as if he’d forced the words out around a lump in his throat. 

“Yes,” Fenris replied, and his voice echoed back at him – a rough rasp that he almost didn’t recognize from the sheer want that thickened it. He had never been allowed to express want for anything before – if he had, it would only have been taken away and the bite of a whip given instead. 

“In that case,” Anders said, and even though Fenris had lowered his eyes, he could tell that Anders was smiling, could hear that warmth in his voice that was like the touch of a kind hand, “could you unlace my trousers instead of tearing them, please? They’re the only pair I’ve got.” 

Fenris hid his smile against Anders’s thigh, and then he tugged the laces open and shoved Anders’s trousers and smallclothes over his narrow hips. The mage’s cock sprang free, and Fenris followed the long curve of it with his eyes as he wrapped his fingers around the base. It was the same deep, flushed pink as Anders’s lips after he was kissed and faintly filigreed with veins, and its glistening head brushed the path of hair that ran down Anders’s stomach. 

“It… it doesn’t look like a nug,” Fenris murmured, feeling a blush race over his cheeks even as he did. 

Anders let out a wild peal of laughter, almost hysterical in its giddiness. “Why would it…?” He trailed off as some kind of realization seemed to dawn on him, and he bit down on his lower lip as if to hold back any more laughter. “Sorry to disappoint you,” he said, his voice carefully serious. 

“I am not disappointed,” Fenris replied. 

He wrapped his lips around Anders’s cock and slid it into his mouth, taking the mage as deep as he could. His hands slipped over Anders’s hips to his arse, and he dug his fingers into the muscle, pulling Anders closer. The mage whimpered softly before the sound was choked off; when Fenris glanced up, he saw that Anders had his teeth sunk hard into his lower lip to bite back his moans. He knelt there for a moment, darting his tongue along the underside of Anders’s cock as he struggled with what to do. Fenris knew what Danarius had liked – his gag reflex lurched in remembrance of it – but he didn’t know what Anders enjoyed, and for this at least it was important. 

Keeping his eyes fixed on Anders’s face, he slipped the mage’s cock almost out of his mouth and curled his tongue against its silky head, flicking it over the smooth ridge at its base. Anders’s adam’s apple leaped upward in his throat as he swallowed another cry, and his back arched, his head falling back against the pillar behind him. Fenris darted the tip of his tongue over the same spot, back and forth, quickening the speed until finally a cry of pleasure tore past the barrier of Anders’s teeth, his mouth falling open. Suppressing a grin of satisfaction, Fenris swirled his tongue over the head of Anders’s cock once more and took him carefully back into his mouth. Anders tasted like the breeze at the docks – salty with just a hint of bitterness – and the skin of his cock was soft against Fenris’s lips, slipping against the roughness of his tongue like velvet under a fingertip. Anders’s breath came in shallow pants, his low moans interspersed with hoarse, breathless pleas. 

“Maker’s pucker,” Anders groaned, the curse sounding torn from his throat; in spite of their absurdity, the words seemed to Fenris in that moment the sweetest he had ever heard. Anders’s fingers skated over the crown of Fenris’s head, stroking his hair before settling on his ears. Fenris tensed, expecting the mage to grab them as Danarius always had, but Anders just lightly ran his fingertips along the rims of them and over the lobes, a whisper of movement, as if he were breathing against them. Fenris’s cock throbbed against the front of his leggings at the touch, and he let one hand drop from where it clutched Anders’s arse to work his own laces open. 

He rested his head against Anders’s groin for a moment, the dark gold curls at the base of the mage’s cock, thick with the seawater scent of his pre-come, brushing his forehead. Then he took himself in his hand and began to stroke himself – quickly at first, that well-learned efficiency taking over – but when he wrapped his lips around Anders’s cock once more and began to slide him in and out again, he matched the rhythm of his hand and his mouth, long, slow, almost teasing. He had his entire life to do what he wanted, didn’t he? There seemed to be no point in rushing anymore, especially when Anders’s cries were growing louder and more insistent with each bob of Fenris’s head. 

Anders must have heard the slick, quiet rhythm of Fenris’s hand on his own cock, because when Fenris glanced up, the mage was staring down at him, mouth hanging open, his fingers clutching at the stone pillar so hard his knuckles were white with the strain. 

“Oh, Andraste’s….” he breathed, his oath tangling with another moan, and he pushed his hips up sharply to meet Fenris’s lips. Keeping his eyes fixed on the mage’s – something he’d never entirely been comfortable with, no matter the situation – Fenris dragged his tongue over the soft skin of Anders’s balls before darting it up the underside of his cock and taking him deep into his throat again. The mage’s inner thigh trembled in spasms against Fenris’s cheek, as if his own electricity trick had been turned against him. A little quiver of panic ran through Fenris – Anders was close, but then what? He remembered all too well how these things ended with Danarius, the gagging, the stifled retching. 

“Fenris – oh, Maker –” Anders gasped. “I’m going to….” Fenris sat back on his heels and wrapped his fingers around Anders’s cock and stroked him, his hand slipping in his own saliva and Anders’s pre-come. The mage let out a sharp cry, arching away from the pillar, and then his come splashed over his stomach and Fenris’s fingers, warm and slippery. As he watched it roll in pale beads over his fingers, Fenris kept stroking Anders, slower now and gentler, and wondered if he should be feeling disgust or revulsion at what he’d done, as he always had before, some sense of having been a means to an end and nothing more. But he felt only the tightening grasp of his own arousal, his cock throbbing in his hand, and that same hunger, barely sated now. 

He leaned forward and nudged his face against Anders’s groin, squeezing his eyes shut, inhaling the scent of Anders’s come, the strange odor that reminded him of the tightly furled buds on the espaliered pear trees in Danarius’s courtyard. His hand still worked on his own cock, but he now he felt almost ashamed of it, at his lack of control, of being overwhelmed by wanting a _mage_ , of all people, when he’d done so long without wanting anyone. He let go of Anders’s softening prick and slid his hand over his hip, grasping at Anders’s arse again, not caring that his fingernails dug into the smooth skin. A sob gathered in his throat as he held himself against Anders, and he struggled to swallow it down. 

He didn’t open his eyes when Anders sank to his knees, leaving Fenris’s hand hanging stupidly in the air for a moment, clutching at nothing. The mage’s warm breath puffed against his cheek, cooling the sweat that sheened it, and then Anders kissed him more thoroughly than Fenris had ever been kissed by anyone, his tongue sweeping over Fenris’s as if wiping the taste of himself from Fenris’s mouth. When he drew away, Fenris opened his eyes to find Anders gazing at him lazily through half-shuttered eyelids, glazed eyes the color of dark rum. 

The mage’s hand rose, fingers curled, and in spite of the slightly drunken-looking grin on Anders’s lips, Fenris flinched in anticipation of a backhand across the face. Anders’s fingers straightened hesitantly, his hand hovering over Fenris’s temple – Fenris thought he could feel his skin rise to meet Anders’s palm, his hair standing on end, straining toward the mage’s touch. Anders brushed his thumb over Fenris’s temple and then delved his fingers into his hair, curling them around his ear as he cupped Fenris’s cheek. Fenris shivered even as he nudged his face against Anders’s hand – the mage was touching only unscarred skin, and the ever-present burn of his markings receded before the unexpected pleasure of the caress, like the stars being blotted out by the brighter light of the rising sun. He felt, for the first time in perhaps years, that he could be still, even as his body cried out for touch, friction. 

His hand had faltered on his cock, pausing in its rushed, inelegant tugging, but then Anders’s fingers brushed over his and took up a new rhythm, languid, regular, gently twisting on each stroke. Fenris groaned and thrust his hips up to meet Anders’s fist, pushing his cock into the tight ring of the mage’s fingers. Pressure welled in his groin, urgent, constricting as it built, and as if Anders could sense that urgency, his pace quickened, his hand slipping easily in the steady stream of pre-come seeping from the slit of Fenris’s cock. Over the roar of blood in his ears, Fenris could hear only the duet of their panting breath and the faint, damp cadence of Anders’s hand on his cock. He thought of all the old anger and hatred festering inside him like slow-acting poison, and though he knew it was absurd, he felt as if Anders were drawing it out of him, purging him of it. 

The world seemed to contract around him, and he contracted with it, toes digging into the dirt floor, fingers curling into claws as they grasped at Anders’s shoulder, the slats of his ribs. And then… release, release like a too-long-held breath being expelled – his come surged from him, spattering Anders’s chest and belly, gushing over his fingers. With a groan, Fenris fell against him, pressing his forehead to Anders’s shoulder, the freckles speckling it seeming to expand before his eyes. 

Anders slid his arm around Fenris’s shoulders and pulled him closer, even as his hand still slowly stroked Fenris’s cock, becoming gentler as the twitches and shudders of Fenris’s orgasm ebbed from his body. He should have been moving away from the mage, he knew, tucking himself away, strapping on his gauntlets, becoming himself again, returning to that safety of seeming untouchable. No, not just _seeming_ – he had _felt_ untouchable too, knowing that he couldn’t respond the way Anders deserved, his body so inured to the constant pain of his markings that it could feel nothing else, couldn’t cinch in anticipation of a lover’s touch, so used to beatings that it couldn’t reach out for another’s body without fear of disappointing, of doing something wrong. Fenris understood pain, and he suspected Anders did too, though while Fenris accepted it, Anders rejected its dominion over both himself and the world. Before, Fenris had thought that a delusion, another of the mage’s too idealistic flights of fancy, but now he envied it. 

“Andraste’s mutton drapes, Fenris, you’re still covered in blood!” Anders cried, flicking at a dark patch of dried blood on Fenris’s pauldron with his fingernail. “And now other things.” He wiped his hand on the torn remnants of his own tunic and began carefully palpating Fenris’s arms, legs, and throat, his fingertips like waterstriders darting on the surface of a pond. “Do you need healing? _More_ healing, that is.” 

Fenris smothered a smile against Anders’s shoulder. “No, mage. If any of that is my blood, it came from a wound long since healed.” 

“Ah,” Anders said, reluctantly taking his hands from Fenris and clenching them around the edges of his coat. At their absence, Fenris again had the strange sensation of his flesh prickling, as if drawing toward Anders. “In that case, would you like to wash?” Anders asked. He glanced down at himself, at their mingled come glistening in the low light as it dried on his stomach. “Perhaps I should too.” He pulled his torn tunic and coat shut, and stood up – Fenris thought he saw a flush rise in his pale cheeks. Why would the mage be coming over all bashful now? But Anders was chattering away, one of those torrents of inconsequential words that he unleashed when he was uneasy and trying to conceal it. “I _do_ have a tub here, you know – for medical purposes, mostly, medicinal baths, soaking wounds, things like that. But it works just as well for regular bathing. And if you boil the water, it hardly smells like sewage anymore. Though I’m sure you’d rather go back to the mansion… unless there are mushrooms in the bath too, it's probably much nicer…” His voice suddenly sounded muffled and distant, and Fenris looked up to find the mage facing the front door of the clinic, head bowed, clicking the bolt of the lock back and forth. 

“I will stay,” Fenris said. One of Anders’s worn handkerchiefs lay on the ground beside him – it must have fallen when he’d sliced open the buckles of the mage’s coat – and he grabbed it and furtively cleaned himself as best he could. He must have looked like a fool kneeling there on the dirt floor almost in full armor with his prick out. When he tucked his cock back into his leggings and laced them up, he still felt uncomfortably sticky, and a glance down at himself found his breastplate and tunic spattered with dried blood and bits of spongy pink _meat_ – viscera and brains. 

A tiny clockwork of panic began to whir in his stomach, and he flicked at the stains with his bare hands. From the corners of his eyes, he could see more blood caked in his hair, fusing it together in clumps. The panic spread as he tried to pry the knots apart with his fingers, bloody flecks raining onto his shoulders to be flicked away with a nervous swipe of the hand. Danarius had always demanded absolute cleanliness from his favorite pet, which meant trips to the area of the bathhouse intended for slaves – colder water, no fawning attendants, no soaking – and being smeared with perfumed oils almost as fine as the ones Danarius himself had rubbed into his crêpy skin by his body servants. He’d kept up a similar routine of bathing once he’d settled into the mansion, exchanging the heavy, musky oils for herbs from the market that he picked up when buying supplies for Anders’s clinic, but he’d told himself it was out of choice, not because he didn’t want Danarius to return and find his favorite slave, his showpiece, covered in filth. And yet, fear skirled through him, though he knew that the magister was dead, that his imagined disappointment meant less than nothing. 

Anders had turned away from the door and was watching him tear at his hair and scrape at the chunks of slaver spotting his breastplate. “I guess I should start filling that tub,” the mage murmured. He headed for the storeroom where he slept, the ends of his torn tunic and coat flapping behind him like wings. Fenris heard some muted cursing and the sound of something heavy being dragged, and then the rusty churn of a water pump. He should have gone to help Anders – it was for him, after all – but every time he tried to take a step in the direction of the storeroom, his eye snagged on another smear of blood to be scratched at, another snarl of hair to be pulled apart with his fingers. 

Only the light pressure of Anders’s hand on his shoulder distracted him from his frantic scrubbing. 

“Fenris?” The mage had shed his ruined coat and tunic, and Fenris blinked at the sight of his bare chest, its paleness mottled with pink. “The bath’s ready. I hope the water’s not too warm for you.” 

“I… thank you,” Fenris muttered, brushing past Anders with his head bowed. His cock was stirring again in the clammy confines of his leggings just from the sight of the mage. He was relieved when Anders didn’t follow him, leaving him to unfasten his breastplate and peel off his leggings in the steamy dimness of the storeroom. The tub was old, its copper tarnished and dented, and the scarves of steam rising off the water smelled of sulfur, but he climbed in anyway, sinking into the warmth. Tiny red threads swirled into the water as the blood on his arms and neck was washed away; pink droplets rained from the ends of his hair, dimpling the surface. He inhaled, noticing for the first time the faint scent of herbs – the very ones he usually bathed with – beneath the odor of the water, and he sank below the surface, feeling his hair rise and float around his head like a dandelion clock. 

He came up, sputtering, and leaned his head back against the rim of the tub. Muffled splashes drifted from the main room of the clinic, along with Anders’s soft humming that meandered as much as his speech tended to, wobbling off-pitch, changing tune suddenly. Still, Fenris strained to hear it over the soft _drip-drip-drip_ of water streaming from his hair. Anders sounded… _buoyant_. The mage often put on an air of flippancy, an irreverence that sometimes irritated Fenris and often sounded labored to his ears, a meager sauce that couldn’t sweeten the misery Anders dealt with at his clinic every day or, Fenris grudgingly admitted to himself, the misery the mage must have suffered at the Ferelden Circle. But now, however briefly, the lightness in Anders’s humming, broken here and there by a burbling whistle, seemed content. Even _happy_. While he was thankful to Anders for giving him some privacy, part of him also wished that the flimsy, sagging wooden wall between the storeroom and the clinic proper would give in to its seeming inclination and crumple, eliminating the barrier between them so that he could see the mage. 

Instead he flared his markings, their light turning the cloudy water to blue milk, and stared down at himself. He had chosen to do what he had done, to prove to himself – and maybe to Danarius’s shade watching from the Void – that he _could_ , never quite thinking that it could have brought Anders happiness. Fenris knew his body could bring people pleasure, but that had always seemed something purely physical – Danarius’s disposition had never changed for the better after he’d used Fenris… not that Fenris would have wished for such a thing. But this… this felt like the acquisition of some new skill, like learning a new sword form – it gave him a hold on the mage that he wasn’t sure yet if he wanted. 

As if sensing Fenris’s thoughts, Anders appeared in the doorway, wearing his coat again to Fenris’s confused disappointment, arms full of fabric that had once been white but was now gray with use. “All right?” he asked. “I brought you a towel. Well, it’s a winding sheet. But it’s clean anyway.” He took a hesitant step into the room. “Justice heard your lyrium, so I wondered if something was wrong.” 

“I am well,” Fenris replied. “Did you want to…?” He started to pull himself out of the tub, skin pebbling as the cooler air hit it. 

“No, I washed in the other room,” Anders blurted. “Take your time.” He dropped the winding sheet on his camp bed and sat down on the uneven stool next to the tub, watching Fenris sink back into the still-warm water. “How are you feeling?” 

Fenris lifted one hand out of the water, letting it trickle through his fingers as he stared at the lyrium brands mapping his palm. “I do not know,” he admitted slowly. “I thought freedom would feel different.” He let out a bitter snort of laughter and let his hand fall back into the water with a splash. 

“You’ve been free for a long time, Fenris,” Anders said softly. “You’ve been free since you left Danarius behind on Seheron. Killing him just made it official.” 

“And yet I still feel chained by these,” Fenris replied, his markings blinking alight for a moment, casting watery diamonds of light on the ceiling before winking out. “You heard what Varania said. I wanted them. I _fought_ for them.” 

Anders leaned forward, folding his arms on the rim of the tub and resting his chin on them. Fenris slid his hand up the side of the tub and curled his fingers around its edge, near the mage’s elbow without touching it. “I somehow doubt you knew the consequences,” Anders said. “You were trying to buy her and your mother’s freedom, at what could have been the expense of your own life. Surely that’s laudable.” 

Fenris hid his sneer by brushing his wet palm over his face, skimming away the damp hair clinging to his temples. “It wasn’t my life to lose, was it? Not that I would have lost.” 

“I see your self-confidence made it through the ordeal unscathed,” Anders murmured, dabbling his fingertips in the water. He seemed to be staring at his own wobbling reflection on the surface of it. 

“But why didn’t I want freedom for myself?!” Fenris asked, though he knew if he didn’t have the answer, Anders wouldn’t either. “Maybe Varania was right – maybe I wanted the special treatment. Maybe I wanted the acclaim of freeing my family, of doing something that she couldn’t do, even with her magic. I was just as foolish as she was for thinking she would ever be a magister,” he muttered, thinking of that power he had over Anders – perhaps he’d been seeking something similar when he’d used the boon to free his family. But was wanting to bring someone happiness always somehow manipulative? He didn’t have enough practice at it to be certain. 

“You were being selfless, Fenris,” Anders replied, his voice still soft but emphatic now. His breath rippled the water when he spoke, the minute wavelets it created meeting with those made by Fenris’s heartbeat. 

“Was I?” Fenris demanded. He sighed, as if to expel the anger that had begun to simmer in his veins again. “I feel unclean, like this magic is not only etched into my skin but has also tainted my soul.” 

“Ah,” Anders said, his face suddenly sad… or sadder. He sat back, brushing his fingers over his brow, leaving glimmering ribbons of bathwater streaking across it. “I don’t know what to make of you, Fenris. Again. Or still.” 

Fenris sank lower in the tub, until the water lapped at his cheekbones, and glared at Anders over the rim of it. Anders would answer the question Fenris should have been asking without him actually asking it – the mage always did. 

Sure enough, Anders waited for a few beats of silence and then went on, “You come here, suck my cock, and then go straight back to complaining about magic. As if magic isn’t part of who I am. As if magic hasn’t put you back together many times.” 

Blue light flickered in the dark room as Anders spoke, and Fenris could hear the distant, disapproving rumble of Justice in his voice. He tilted his head up, clearing the water’s surface, and said, “Yes, I know that magic has its uses—” 

“Perhaps I should be saying that I don’t know what to make of myself instead,” Anders said, with a soft laugh that sounded more like a release of tension than actual amusement, though Fenris caught a hint of disbelief in it. “You’ve made your opinion of mages very clear – and your opinion of _me_ – and still sometimes, I—” He snapped his mouth shut, cutting off the words, and clamped his lips into a thin line as if to keep any more from escaping. 

“You what?” Fenris prompted. Confusion churned in his stomach, and he felt suddenly very aware that he was naked and unarmed and floating in a tub of water, but an odd sense of excitement had sparked to life within him too – a feeling of being on the brink of something entirely new. That, he tried to tamp down, for now he could remember having felt it before – when the competition for the lyrium markings had first been announced. 

Anders shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t know how to make you understand. Magic is a gift from the Maker, but like any gift, it can be misused. As Danarius did, as Varania might have, and as I have always promised myself that I would not.” Another mirthless laugh, now tremulous. “Not that Justice would let me now anyway.” 

“So your demon doesn’t want to share you?” Fenris asked, though it had no heat in it. For a moment, he felt as if he were playing with one of the cats, poking its exposed belly and then darting his hand away when it swiped at him. 

The mage was pressing one long finger against an eyebrow, as if his head pained him, and he glared at Fenris through the rest of his fingers, but neither he nor his demon rose to the bait. Instead, he sighed and said, “Your markings weren’t a gift exactly, and they cause you great pain, but would you stop using them? They got your family’s freedom – for what that was worth – and they let you kill Danarius. Could you give them up?” 

He looked as though he expected an answer, but Fenris just slipped down into the water again, until only his eyes and ears were above the surface. His markings itched as magic blazed into Anders’s hands – the water heated up around him, steam spiraling upward once more. 

“I have suffered because of my magic,” Anders said softly, staring at the wisps of it wreathing his fingers before dispelling them. Fenris winced and looked away, remembering the shiny, puckered scars crisscrossing Anders’s back, some silvery with age, others still puffy and angry reddish-pink. “But I would never stop using it, not just because it’s part of me, but because I have used it to help people. I’ve brought you back from passing into the Fade with it.” Fenris watched the mage’s adam’s apple bob in the shadowed pallor of his throat as he swallowed. “For that alone, I couldn’t give it up.” 

Anders had tipped the stool back toward the bath as he’d spoken, and Fenris flooded his markings with light to see the mage’s face in the dimness, suddenly frustrated that he was as unable to read emotion in the man’s voice as he was to read written words. The glow of them was diffused by the cloudiness of the water, casting a blue haze over Anders’s face soft as a fine gauze, further paling the mage’s cheeks, turning the pink of his lips a sickly purple, and changing the deep gold of his eyes to green, green as Varania’s, green as Fenris’s own. For a moment, Anders’s face was like a window with the curtains pulled open, but as Fenris stared at him, unsure of what to say, of even what Anders was hinting at, those curtains were slowly drawn once more, and the mage let out a quiet sigh that seemed equal parts tiredness and disappointment. 

“Why _did_ you come here, Fenris?” Anders asked. The stool swayed back once more on its uneven legs, the shadows curling back into the hollows under his cheekbones. “The cock-sucking – while greatly appreciated – seemed like more of a spur-of-the-moment decision.” 

Fenris felt his cheeks go hot in a way that had nothing to do with the warmth of the bathwater. He should have been accustomed to this by now, the mage’s brief flashes of what he considered crudeness. Perhaps it wasn’t crudeness at all, just a reflection of Anders’s comfort with sex, but still it made Fenris feel inexperienced, immature, embarrassed – he’d only done such things before out of necessity, an inability to refuse, never out of real desire. Until Anders. The heat in his cheeks blazed until he thought the water would boil from it. 

When he answered, he was surprised at how level his voice was. “To kill you,” he replied, watching the reflection of his markings shrink to a pinpoint in Anders’s eyes as they narrowed. He wondered if his words had felt like a lash to the mage, and after a moment, he tried to mitigate that pain, as Danarius sometimes had when having him beaten – telling another slave to tip a healing potion down Fenris’s throat before taking another swipe with the whip. It wasn’t Fenris’s intention to reopen freshly healed wounds, especially not ones he had made, but he feared his words would have the same effect. “Or… or just to rid myself of you somehow. After finding out about Varania’s plan and finally killing Danarius, I wanted to purge magic from my life completely.” He looked up and could make out the mage’s hand in the gloom, flitting back and forth over his own chest, tracing what Fenris now knew was the scar above his heart made by a templar’s blade. “But I could not.” 

Watching Anders lift his eyes to meet Fenris’s was like watching the sun rise, just as slow and just as difficult to look at. By the time the mage’s gaze met his, Fenris was shivering, despite the lingering heat of the water. He heard Anders gasp, a roughly caught breath, and then the mage bolted to his feet, the stool toppling over from the force of the movement, and pulled his coat around himself. 

Fenris grasped the rim of the tub to lever himself out of the water. “I must go,” he muttered as he climbed out of the tub, reaching for the fabric piled on the camp bed. “I should never have come. A clean break would have been better.” 

“No, don’t you dare!” Anders cried, lunging toward the cot and grabbing hold of the winding sheet. Fenris should have let go of it, but he was naked and dripping and deeply regretting having left his armor out of easy reach, and so he was nearly jerked off his feet when Anders tugged the fabric toward him. 

He righted himself, resisting the urge to yank the sheet back in his direction, and glared up at Anders. “Why would you _not_ want me to go? I was going to kill you, you fool mage!” 

“You say that like it’s a dealbreaker,” Anders replied, the corner of his lips curling up in that smirk that Fenris loathed, not least because it was always the one the mage wore when he appeared in Fenris’s dreams – dreams from which he awoke painfully hard and drenched in sweat. Dreams in which Anders brought him to the brink of coming and then left in disgust at some misstep that Fenris had made. Before he could respond, Anders whipped the sheet out of his hand and tossed it back onto the cot. 

“Maker’s breath, you’re beautiful, Fenris,” Anders breathed, his gaze like a candle flame leaving a trail of heat over Fenris’s body. 

Fenris moved to cover himself with his hands, and it was as if the gesture jarred Anders out of a trance – the mage blinked, and then he dove toward Fenris, burying his face against his throat and sucking the unmarked skin along his jaw between his lips. Disappointment curdled sourly on Fenris’s tongue, his stomach quivering, even as his cock stiffened – he was used to being desired for his appearance. When Danarius had paraded him around in front of the other magisters, it wasn’t just his lyrium markings that they’d eyed hungrily, men and women both. But was that _all_ Anders wanted from him? 

The mage was dropping kisses along Fenris’s clavicle, his fingers climbing slowly down his spine as if it were a ladder of bone. His erection pressed against Fenris’s stomach, and Fenris rocked his hips upward, sliding his cock along Anders’s, hissing in irritation as the fabric of the mage’s trousers chafed the markings on the underside of it. He tangled his fingers into the short, silky hair at the back of Anders’s head – the mage moaned against his collarbone at the tug and grabbed Fenris’s arse with both hands, drawing him closer, until Fenris pulled harder, jerking Anders’s head back. 

“Why, mage?” he asked, activating his markings, if only to see Anders’s face better. 

“Andraste’s wet knickers, Fenris, why what?” He strained against Fenris’s grasp on his hair, trying to bow his head back to his bare chest, but Fenris tightened his grip. 

“Why do you… why are we…? Why—” 

“I thought that was fairly obvious,” Anders interrupted, grinning as he gave one of Fenris’s arse cheeks a squeeze. 

“Not that. Or not that exactly.” 

Anders sighed and looked down, the light from Fenris’s lyrium making his eyelashes cast soft, feathery shadows on his cheekbones. “I was trying to say… perhaps in too many words,” he said. His other hand slid up Fenris’s back, and he circled his fingers over the bone of Fenris’s shoulder, spreading and then contracting them. “It’s hard to tell sometimes, the best tack to use with you, you know. Usually I end up giving in to habit and running my mouth, but this was more… delicate.” He glanced up at Fenris, a quick, imploring look, a flit of eyelashes, a sharp, pensive bite to his full lower lip. “If I had been direct, you probably wouldn’t have trusted me.” 

Fenris let go of the mage’s hair, suddenly afraid that Anders would feel his hands trembling. Anders, freed, bent to follow with his lips the pattern made by his fingertips on Fenris’s shoulder, seemingly unbothered by Fenris standing rigid in his arms. “I was afraid of disappointing you,” he said, his voice a faint croak to his own ears. He knew why the mage kept dancing around the subject – he must have feared – or _known_ – that Fenris wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t be able to reciprocate. Fenris wasn’t entirely sure himself if he did, but after learning that he had sacrificed himself for his mother and sister, he knew he was capable of feeling something similar. And yet he couldn’t put a name to it, even in just his own thoughts. 

He felt Anders smile against his shoulder, felt the tip of the mage’s long nose brush back and forth over his skin as Anders shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I mean, I’m not saying you _would_ , but… I’m sure I’m going to disappoint you plenty – I already have –” Anders trailed off, his words fading into a soft, pleased hum as he turned his head to kiss the side of Fenris’s neck, his lips curving along the tendril of lyrium there. “Disappointment – it’s less serious when… other things are there to overwhelm it. It’s like a single voice of complaint drowned out by a chorus of praise.” 

“Your disappointment has a very loud, thundering voice,” Fenris replied, and a smile quivered over his lips as Anders’s laugh tumbled against his throat. 

“Fenris.” The word – _his name_ – reverberated in the air like the toll of a silver bell on a cold morning. Anders raised his head and looked down at him, his golden-brown eyes warm as bathwater. Fenris tried to turn away from that stare after a moment, uneasiness trembling in his stomach – eye contact hadn’t been allowed in Danarius’s household unless it was with other slaves, and even then Fenris had avoided it out of habit. The nakedness of Anders’s gaze was too much, made worse by being able to see his own reflection in it, the troubled furrow of his brows, the uncertain frown of his lips. Anders’s palm cupped his cheek, but he didn’t force Fenris to look at him – he just brushed the warm, callused pad of his thumb over the crest of Fenris’s cheekbone, until Fenris dared a quick glance up at him. 

“I love you,” Anders said, his eyes pleating at the corners as he smiled, as if he enjoyed saying words that Fenris couldn’t remember ever having said himself. “I’ve been holding off from saying that, because…” He sighed; Fenris could feel his ribcage expand and deflate against his own, could smell the hint of lyrium on his breath like a breeze full of oncoming rain. “…because I didn’t want to, because I wasn’t sure if it would be accepted….” 

Blood rushed in Fenris’s ears, almost drowning out the mage’s voice. The strange calm that overtook him in battle enveloped him now, that blank composure that was always so at odds with what was happening around him. It was really only another form of armor, for inside his gut churned, gushing out waves of panic that flooded him until his limbs felt as though they belonged to someone else. How was he expected to respond? _Was_ he expected to respond? Anders didn’t seem expectant – he just leaned forward and pressed a kiss on the cheekbone that he’d been stroking. Fenris tried to keep from flinching at the contact. He’d often accused Anders of being possessed by a demon, but perhaps the man was something of a demon himself – Danarius and the other magisters had often spoken of the opportunism of demons, crowding around the Veil waiting for weak prey that would succumb to their temptation and carry them into the physical world. Anders seemed willing to attach himself to whomever would listen to him prattle and wouldn’t instantly turn him over to the templars. 

And yet even as they whirled through his mind, Fenris knew those thoughts were unfair. The hesitance, the _fear_ , that was clutching his throat and squeezing it shut had little to do with Anders himself. The knowledge that Fenris had once loved someone else was still too fresh – and now too raw – a wound, as was the knowledge that someone who might have once loved him now hated him enough to sell him back into slavery. Anders wasn’t Varania, of course, and whatever was between him and the mage was leagues away from what should have between a brother and sister, but still the question nagged at him – if his own sister couldn’t love him, how could anyone else? Even someone like Anders. 

He swallowed, the effort of forcing down the lump in his throat making his eyes sting, and choked out, “How can you?” 

“To the Void with that,” Anders said, his voice thick, and his breath was hot on Fenris’s lips before he kissed him. 

The kiss went on until Fenris, head whirling, felt like he was both drowning and having life breathed back into him, his hands clutching at Anders’s coat to hold himself up and in the hope of ripping it from the mage’s back. Finally, Anders turned his face aside, panting against Fenris’s cheek. Fenris was hard again, cock leaving a damp trail on the front of Anders’s trousers, and the mage reached between them and cupped Fenris’s erection in his hand, the heel of his palm barely brushing the head of it. With a soft groan that was muffled by Anders’s ridiculous feathered pauldrons, Fenris pushed his hips against the mage’s hand. 

Anders guided him toward the camp bed, so slowly that Fenris didn’t realize it until the backs of his knees struck the side of it, and he sat down hard on the pile of fabric on top of it, leaving him on a level with the straining laces of the mage’s trousers. He hesitated, chewing on his lower lip – could Anders want _that_ again? His hands twitched toward the waist of Anders’s trousers indecisively before he clenched them into fists on the rough canvas of the cot, and he felt himself redden, even as a hard splinter of stubbornness pierced him. Anders was the one who had apparently fucked his way through the Ferelden Circle _and_ several of the whorehouses in Denerim – let _him_ direct matters. He stared up expectantly at the mage through the veil of his fringe. 

“Maker, Fenris,” Anders murmured, running his hand over Fenris’s hair, fingers grazing the tip of his ear just enough to make him shiver. And then Anders’s hand flitted away, and the mage was slipping his coat off, letting it puddle on the dirt floor behind him, despite the care he usually took with the mangy thing. He sank to his knees between Fenris’s legs, hands stroking his thighs, his thumbs massaging the inside of them in small circles, even as he arched upward to kiss Fenris again. 

Fenris bowed his head to meet the mage’s lips, eagerly parting his to take Anders’s tongue into his mouth. He tangled his fingers into Anders’s hair, pulling him closer and kissing him hungrily, irrationally, only caring about the taste of the mage’s mouth on his tongue, the way their lips clung to one another’s, the sound of their panting breath and the occasional tiny click of their teeth hitting together. Perhaps he should have been self-conscious about the messiness, should have tried to hide his inexperience, but once he began kissing Anders, it was all about greed – touch as much as you can, taste as much as you can, make him touch you as much as you can. It was battle, a mutual grab for territory. 

All too soon, though, Anders was drawing away, tugging Fenris’s lower lip gently with his teeth as he did, and he dabbed kisses like hot, fat raindrops down Fenris’s chin, over his sternum, atop each nipple. His hands and lips seemed destined to converge on Fenris’s cock, and yet every time they drew near, they darted away again. Fenris could feel pressure building at the base of his cock, that inexorable, overwhelming pleasure that made the rest of his body seem an afterthought – all he wanted was for Anders to touch him, suck him off, anything to relieve that unbearable yet ecstatic stress. But then Anders was gently trying to ease Fenris back onto the camp bed, and fear began to hiss and spit in his stomach like a fire in the rain, memories of Danarius’s brutality deluging him – the blood, the pain, the nights spent curled into a ball in the privy, waiting for the next bout of cramps to wrack him. He reached up, hands scrabbling as if trying to claw his way out of a nightmare, and grabbed Anders’s shoulders, shoving at him. Anders let himself be pushed, and the momentum rolled them both over, Anders on his back and Fenris kneeling between his legs. His hands were still trembling as he tore open Anders’s trousers and shoved them down his slim, freckled thighs. Anders’s erection lolled back against his pale stomach, and Fenris gave the underside of it a rough lick as he tugged the mage’s trousers the rest of the way off and threw them aside. 

“Roll over, mage,” he ordered, but Anders shook his head, lifting it just enough that Fenris could see his grin. 

“No, love, I want to see you,” the mage replied. Fenris winced. The form of address suited him as little as “Leto” did. Anders, on the other hand, had slipped into using it as easily as donning a new coat… or easier, considering how attached he was to that feathered monstrosity. Still, the words, the caress of them, if not their substance, made that fist of arousal clench even harder in Fenris’s groin. He buried his face against Anders’s stomach with a groan. Keeping his eyes squeezed shut, he ran his hands over Anders’s hips, along the valleys where his legs met his groin, to his inner thighs, letting his nails catch the soft skin, before he dug his fingers into the backs of Anders’s thighs and spread his legs wide. Again, he was haunted by the shade of his times with Danarius – the magister would have just plunged directly into Fenris, ignoring his cries of pain if he wasn’t further aroused by them, maybe dampening Fenris with a gob of spit if he was feeling particularly charitable – but he would not do that to Anders, even if the mage would have permitted it. 

Finally he raised his head, resting his chin on the softness of Anders’s stomach – the mage was such a confounding mix of unexpected softnesses and hardnesses, with the slightly loose skin of one who never had enough to eat and the firmness of muscle that Fenris assumed was from his time as a Grey Warden. 

“I don’t want to…” he began but bit the words off. He’d been going to say, “hurt you” but knew that he himself would have bristled at the implication. A small flicker of disappointment crossed Anders’s face, but that was all. “I mean, I’m not sure how….” It was not an admission he often made, though he was all too aware of the depth of his own ignorance, and his cheeks and tips of his ears burned with shame, embarrassment, and the awareness that he had failed Anders. 

Anders sat up, golden hair falling around his face, forcing Fenris to sit back on his heels. “We all thought this spell ridiculous back at the Tower,” he said, “but we learned quickly enough that it has its more practical uses.” Fenris’s markings gave a twinge as Anders cast his magic, and then the mage’s hand was full of something with the sheen of grease on it. Anders leaned toward Fenris, brushing a kiss over his lips as he smeared the substance over Fenris’s erection – it was slick and warm from the heat of Anders’s hand – giving his cock a few teasing strokes before lying back on the cot again. 

“Mage, do you really….” Fenris said, rising back onto his knees. He had the sensation again of his flesh being drawn toward Anders’s, skin prickling into goosebumps at the proximity of the mage, as if Anders’s magic called to the lyrium in Fenris’s markings the way they sang to the _spirit_. But he knew it wasn’t that – he’d made a conscious choice, and the want, the pull, he felt wasn’t something he could explain away so simply. All of him strained forward toward Anders, desperate to be inside him, to feel how their bodies fit together, and – selfishly perhaps – to finally know what it was like to fuck someone he’d chosen, someone whose body he enjoyed the sight of, someone whose pleasure he wanted to be responsible for, even as the thought daunted him. 

“ _Maker, yes_ , please,” Anders replied before he could finish – it came out almost as a groan, threaded through with frustration and, gratifyingly, as much desire as Fenris himself felt. How different pleading sounded when the word preceding “please” was “yes” rather than “no”. 

Fenris slipped his hands up Anders’s groin and over his hips, letting his thumbs barely graze the mage’s cock as they passed. Anders gasped at even that contact – in the dimness, Fenris saw a flash of white as the mage sank his teeth into his lower lip to hold back his cry – and his cock twitched, a few milky drops of pre-come trickling from its slit. He bowed his head and licked them away with a quick swipe of his tongue, enveloped in the now-familiar seawater smell of Anders, smiling against the mage’s thigh as Anders moaned and clutched at the sheet beneath him. 

“Fenris, _please_ ,” Anders said, hooking his legs over Fenris’s hips and squeezing him between his thighs. “Even the famed Grey Warden stamina can only last so long.” 

He understood the mage’s urgency – the muscles of his thighs, groin, and stomach were clenched almost to the point of cramping, and the grease Anders had smeared on him was mixing with his own pre-come and running down his cock – but nervousness still warred with the tension building inside him. What if the anticipation turned out to be better than the act itself? Though the dread of Danarius’s attentions never overshadowed the horror of the physical acts themselves. It seemed only fair for it to work both ways, though he knew all too well that fairness was no guarantee of anything. 

Fenris dug his trembling fingers into the mage’s hips and pulled Anders toward him, gently pressing the head of his cock against Anders’s arsehole. He was answered with a rock of the mage’s hips against him and an encouraging squeeze of his thighs against Fenris’s sides. Another cautious nudge, and the head of his cock, slick from the grease, slid into Anders… and he stopped. The feel of Anders around him, the heat of him – it was too much. He propped himself up on his hands above Anders, closing his eyes to the sight of pale skin starred with freckles and the hard, flushed cock dripping a string of pre-come onto the mage’s stomach. 

Anders’s feet, crossed at the small of Fenris’s back, pressed against his arse as if trying to urge him deeper inside. Feeling his arms shaking, Fenris lifted one hand and stroked Anders’s cock, slow, light caresses that made the mage shiver and squirm beneath him. Anders loosely braceleted Fenris’s wrist with his fingers, as if to stop the contact, but after a pause, his fingers slid over Fenris’s and interlocked with them around his cock. Together, they stroked Anders, hands slipping and sliding messily over each other, until the mage was moaning, head rolling back and forth on the winding sheet beneath him, and the thrust of his hips toward Fenris took on a more demanding edge. 

Holding his breath, Fenris sank deeper into him, inch by inch, until his balls pressed against the soft, pliant muscle of Anders’s arse. He paused there a moment, pleasure roiling through him, rocking him like waves in the bay breaking against the seawall. The grip of Anders’s body on him was slippery but tight, and each roll of the mage’s hips squeezed Fenris’s cock. He _wanted_ to move, wanted to thrust into Anders again and again, feel the slap of their bodies together, taste the mingling of their sweat, but greedily he wanted to savor it as well, not lose himself completely to the sensations and end them too soon. 

Each moan and cry from Anders was eroding his control, though, and he slid almost all the way out of the mage before thrusting back in, the motion pushing Anders’s cock through their intertwined fingers. Fenris heard a strange, distant noise – throaty, wordless – and realized it was his own voice. His other arm gave way, and he collapsed onto Anders, their joined hands still working his cock between them. He buried his face against Anders’s sweat-damp chest, abandoning himself to the snap of his hips into the mage’s. Anders threaded his other hand into Fenris’s hair, his fingers tugging it gently with each thrust, the tugs pulling tighter as Fenris fucked into him harder, deeper. 

One sharp jerk yanked Fenris’s head back so that he was looking into Anders’s face, and he watched, fascinated, his rhythm stuttering, as ecstasy washed over the mage’s face. His fine eyebrows were furrowed, a tiny crescent denting the skin between them and then being smoothed away, as if the mage were in fleeting pain, and a hectic flush stained the tops of his high cheekbones. Sweat-soaked hair, the dark gold of wet sand, curlicued over his cheeks and forehead, mirroring the lines of lyrium on Fenris’s own body. Then, blue light shone through cracks in Anders’s skin, and from under his half-closed eyelids, Fenris could see the sparking blue glow that meant Justice had taken over. 

He paused, feeling himself soften in Anders as panic rose in him – should he pull away? It was Anders he wanted, not the spirit, certainly not the demon. Both the swirling light in his eyes and the rifts in the mage’s skin flickered in and out of existence, though Anders didn’t seem to be struggling with Justice as he sometimes did. And when Anders opened his eyes and met Fenris’s questioning gaze, they were human eyes, burnished gold. Fenris had to look furtively away, for the expression in them, adding even more warmth to their honeyed brown, both excited and terrified him. Was that what love looked like? Why did it look so wrong with his reflection overlaid on it? 

Anders sat up a little, craning his neck to kiss him, and Fenris thrust into him again as they kissed, slower and more tentative than before. The mage sank his teeth into Fenris’s lip at the first push, and Fenris groaned into his mouth. He ground his hips against Anders’s in slow, lazy circles, his stomach brushing the mage’s cock with every thrust. Anders’s thighs trembled against his sides, and he broke away from Fenris’s mouth to let out a sharp cry, head thrown back. That cry was like a dart of pleasure sinking deep into Fenris’s groin, and he sped up, thrusting into Anders deeper and faster, his free hand slipping around to clutch at the mage’s arse, lifting his hips off the cot. 

From the pitch of Anders’s moans and the rapid twitch of his stomach muscles, Fenris knew he was close, and that thought alone pulled the coil of tension winding in his groin even tighter. He felt not like he was coming undone, but as if he were being turned inside out, being drawn through Anders as if his markings were activated and he was phasing through the mage’s very flesh and bone. He snapped his hips against Anders’s once more, burying himself inside of him, his balls pressing hard against Anders’s arse. Anders kept on helplessly rocking his hips against him as if he were still meeting Fenris’s thrusts, his body clutching rhythmically at Fenris’s cock. Fenris snapped his eyes shut, trying to focus on stroking Anders, but in spite of himself, he thrust into him quickly, shallowly. Finally, Anders moaned loud enough to bring the rickety, rotted-wood ceiling of the clinic down on their heads, and Fenris opened his eyes to see the mage arching up off the cot, his come shooting over his stomach and chest. 

He jerked, a jolt of electricity bolting from the base of his spine before crackling through him at the sight of the mage coming _for him_. His cock throbbed inside of Anders, a low sound – almost a growl to his ears – rumbling from his throat, as his orgasm consumed him. Fenris dug his fingers into the muscle of Anders’s arse, holding him in place as he quaked above him, trying to push even deeper as he spent himself into the mage. 

Still trembling, he slid his softening prick out of Anders and climbed onto the cot beside him. Their bodies weren’t touching, and yet it seemed that electricity still sparked between them, that their panting breath had taken on the same tempo as it slowed. It even felt to Fenris as if his sweat were trickling toward Anders the better to merge with his. He wanted to look at the mage, to turn on his side, prop himself up on his elbow, and search Anders’s face for approval or satisfaction, but he forced himself to stay on his back, staring up at the sagging rafters above them. 

It was Anders who closed the gap between them, shifting just close enough for their upper arms to touch, bare, sweaty skin kissing bare, sweaty skin. From the corner of his eyes, Fenris saw the mage tug a corner of the winding sheet up to wipe away the gleaming splatters of come on his chest and belly, and then the whole camp bed shook as Anders rolled onto his side. He reached over to brush the sweat-damp hair from Fenris’s forehead, and Fenris, in spite of the sluggishness of his blood after his orgasm, arched upward into the touch. He still couldn’t quite make himself meet the mage’s gaze, though, and after a moment, Anders let out a soft laugh, dropped a kiss onto Fenris’s lips, and rolled onto his back again. 

“You’re welcome to stay, but as I’m sure you can tell, this bed isn’t comfortable for one, much less two,” Anders said. His voice sounded lazy, as if he’d just awoken from a nap. He was running his fingertips back and forth in small arcs over his own chest, just the slightest graze, as if he were easing himself back into not being touched. 

“What do I do now?” Fenris asked, surprised at the words even as they left his lips, directing his question toward the hollow spaces between the rafters now filled with the smell of their fucking, that musky, humid odor like the scent of leaf litter and humus that covered the jungle floor on Seheron. 

“Rest, Fenris,” Anders replied. “Like I said, even Grey Warden stamina has its limits.” 

Fenris gave a sharp sniff of laughter. “That is not what I meant. Though….” he trailed off and coughed into his fist – his curled fingers smelled like Anders. “Maybe it is time to leave this hatred behind. It’s poison, yet I continue to swallow it. There is no one left to blame, now that Danarius and Hadriana are gone. What I have done, I have done to myself.” 

Anders’s little finger curled around Fenris’s and squeezed hard, and Fenris had the sensation that they were lying on a raft at sea – the ceiling seemed to dissolve into the inky blackness of the night sky, heavy-laden with stars. “Hatred has its uses, but if you are putting aside your hatred of mages, I wouldn’t complain.” When Fenris didn’t reply, Anders’s finger slipped away from his, unmooring him. “If you can recognize yourself without it, it’s vestigial. You will have outgrown it.” 

The mage’s voice sounded suddenly distant, as if it were calling to him over a stretch of dark water. Fenris slid his hand over Anders’s where it lay on the bed between them, ignoring the irritation as the mage’s knuckles grazed the markings on his palm. 

“What do you do when you don’t have to run anymore?” he asked. 

“I don’t know,” Anders replied, and his voice sounded even farther away, so far that Fenris slipped his fingers between the mage’s and pushed his fingertips into Anders’s palm, clinging fast. “I’ll never know.” 

“Well, then it is fortunate that I’m very good at running,” he said, and slowly Anders curled his fingers around his, locking their hands together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next week's chapter will be up a bit late (hopefully Tuesday instead of Monday). Thank you for reading!


	21. Chapter 21

Anders wondered how long it would take to become accustomed to sharing a bed again. It was a bit like stepping into too-hot bathwater, he thought – uncomfortable at first, then manageable, and finally pleasurable. When he’d first been taken to the Circle, he could hardly bear hearing even the deep, steady breath of the other apprentices who shared his room – it was too different from the comfortable, familiar noises of his parents, and he’d lain awake for nights on end, unable to ignore the snores, sighs, and tearful sniffles of the others. Karl had changed that – Karl, and the dawning realization that he had no bed waiting for him back home – even before they’d become lovers, before they’d been old enough to be part of the everyone kissing everyone else in the Circle. After long hours of being denied contact with one another, of having to pretend indifference to keep the templars from getting any leverage over them, there was comfort to be gained from sharing someone else’s body heat, from nestling your head against someone’s chest and letting the watery thud of their heartbeat lull you into sleep. With the Wardens, sharing bedrolls had been done out of necessity but also out of a need to reaffirm one’s survival, that one still had a living body that could touch other living bodies.

But he was getting ahead of himself. Being presumptuous. Maybe allowing some of the baseless and somewhat pathetic optimism of the man he’d used to be creep into his thoughts. After all, the last time he’d shared a bed with Fenris, he’d woken up screaming and thought he’d burnt the elf to a cinder with magic. He still hadn’t fully forgiven himself for waking up a supremely lazy cat either. 

Now, he woke up by degrees, truly feeling as if he were stepping back into his body from the Fade and reacquainting himself with all its creaks and dusty, neglected corners. There was the soreness first, soreness deep in muscles that hadn’t been used much of late, the burn of inner thighs and buttocks, the fainter ache in the abdomen from being tightened and relaxed. Then, when he shifted on the cot, the bruises announced themselves, sharper, overlaying the soreness – he probably had hand-shaped continents of bruises on the backs of his thighs, archipelagos of bruises made by fingertips on his arse. 

Moving – or trying to move – made everything cramp up. He’d been balanced on the hard wooden edge of the cot all night, holding himself still to keep from disturbing Fenris – to keep from touching him, if he was honest, as Fenris seemed uneasy with being touched without a specific purpose – not wanting to push him or overwhelm him or…. Not that it had mattered – the elf’s forehead was pressed against Anders’s back, the lyrium dots on it almost humming against the skin between his shoulder blades; Fenris’s drawn-up knees nudged his arse; and the tips of his bare toes wriggled from time to time against the backs of Anders’s calves, which should have bothered him more, considering that Fenris had been gallivanting about Darktown in bare feet. 

But above all the complaints of his body – and there were many; not even the extra Grey Warden stamina and strength could completely hold off the effects of age – Justice was muttering in his head, what Anders assumed was a disapproving litany about distractions and purpose until he heard the word “Fade”. He went very still, as if that would make Justice easier to hear over Fenris’s soft, even breath. 

_The Fade. It was_ inside _us. Did you feel it? I felt so close to home again._

Anders felt himself blush. He’d certainly never been anything close to a prude, but how to explain to a spirit that the nostalgia he felt for his home was the result of lyrium burned into an elf’s prick? “It was Fenris,” he told Justice. “The lyrium you like so much, only… closer.” _Much, much closer_. 

He almost choked when, after a few moments of musing, Justice asked, almost timidly, _Will there be another opportunity for such closeness?_

“I don’t know,” Anders replied silently. Fenris shifted against him, and something silky, warm, and very hard brushed the back of Anders’s thigh. Best that Justice _not_ completely understand how that closeness was achieved, Anders thought as he reluctantly peeled back the sheet and swung his legs over the side of the camp bed. He tucked the sheet around Fenris again and got up, willing away the beginnings of his own erection. 

The bucket he’d used to wash the night before still had some water in it. Anders soaked a bit of toweling in it without bothering to heat it up and scrubbed at the semen that had dried in crusty patches on his chest and stomach, biting back a gasp at the chill of the water. Justice disapproved of using warm water to wash – the magic used to heat it could have been better used for healing after all, and any fuel used to heat it in the usual way would have been a waste as well. He almost cast a quick spell to warm it, just to be contrary. When was the last time he’d done something just for himself? Well, arguably, last night – though he hoped Fenris had enjoyed it too. Anders had always prided himself on his conscientiousness in that regard. At the Circle he’d wanted to please Karl and then had just wanted to be _liked_ , to be considered good at something other than getting caught, and it was just good business when one worked in a brothel – a punter who wasn’t brought off was a punter who asked for his coin back. Fenris had certainly come – Anders had the evidence on his arse and inner thighs to prove it – but that didn’t mean much. One of the apprentices in Ferelden had messed his robes if you brushed past him too closely in the Tower library – getting someone to come was the easy part, or, rather, Anders had worked very hard to make it the easy part. 

Not that the other part – the emotional part, he supposed – was difficult for him either, at least not when it came to knowing what he felt. Emotions for him were like slashes from a well-honed blade – sharp, clean, clear. Ambivalence wasn’t something he was often troubled by. He’d never seen much point to holding back his feelings either. Why leave something unsaid when you could awkwardly blurt it out as soon as the mood took you? That had been especially useful in the Deep Roads – if you held anything back, you might not get a chance to say it. Of course, being at the Circle had at least taught him to be selective about whom he told, but he didn’t feel any shame about sharing his feelings with the person they were directed toward. If they didn’t feel the same, well, at least he’d tried. Love was a bit like magic for him and not in a cloyingly poetic sort of way – a spell that didn’t work would simply dissipate harmlessly, but you had to cast it to know whether or not it would take. 

Fenris didn’t make that distinction any easier, Fenris whose emotional constipation made Nathaniel Howe’s look like a Hurlock grunt compared to a Hurlock Alpha. Trying to sort out the expressions that crossed the elf’s face when Anders had said “I love you” had been like attempting to sort grains of sand into piles by shades of beige. He’d looked surprised at first, which had collapsed into fright, which had hardened into mistrust, which had been scrubbed away and replaced with an unsettling calm. A calm that in turn had been at odds with the choked half-sob “How can you?” Which had been a question that Anders didn’t have a proper answer for. He may have felt and recognized his emotions quickly and neatly, but explaining them, especially when he could feel positive and negative ones simultaneously and yet with equal sharpness, was not something he’d ever had to do. Usually people responded with “I love you too,” or fucked you into the mattress, or said, “Oh, go soak your head, idiot mage”, all of which were far clearer than Fenris’s response. 

He toweled himself off with a ragged flannel and sat down at the listing table he used as a desk. He could feel his eyes straying toward the door to the storeroom, looking for Fenris, gleaming white hair stark against the dimness behind him. His bare toes curled into the sawdust on the floor as if to root him in place – he’d have to face Fenris eventually, and Maker knew _which_ Fenris it would be. Or perhaps it would even be Leto. Andraste’s nipple tassels, the elf’s life had been rewritten, torn to pieces, and poorly glued back together in the course of a few hours – as little as Anders wanted to argue with Fenris, he would have understood it for a change. 

Fenris’s gauntlets lay on the dirt floor beside his desk where Fenris had left them, glittering and empty as sloughed-off serpent skin. Their clawed tips were still black with dried blood – Danarius’s blood, Anders assumed – and he gathered them up, laying them across his lap and buffing away the stains with the flannel. He’d never noticed before how intricately jointed they were – it was hard to admire the craftsmanship of something you were certain was moments away from punching into your chest – beautiful in a harsh way, prickly, oddly graceful, much like their owner. 

_Would you abandon our mission for this elf?_ Justice asked. 

“Gotten over your hunger for the Fade, have you?” Anders replied. Once he had been comforted by these silent conversations with Justice, but now he often found himself impatient or perplexed by them. He’d thought that Justice, the friend he’d known, had gone, and the voice who mostly nagged but sometimes exhorted him was a memory or a conscience that had taken root during Justice’s residence. But then other times, it was much more of a dialogue, if only because Justice’s wishes were so at odds with his own that they had to have been alien. “I’m not abandoning anything. Mages’ rights, Fenris, any of it.” 

_I let myself be guided by your will when we merged. You wanted freedom for mages. That was something I understood. It is just. This… I do not understand. It is a distraction from our original purpose._

Anders saw his distorted reflection in the burnished steel of the gauntlet he was polishing, a sad smile twisting his mouth. “I would never have thought of mages’ rights if not for you,” he said. “I can care about more than one thing. I can _want_ more than one thing. In fact, _not_ caring about more than one thing can destroy you. It uses you up.” Though he was certain Justice could hear his thoughts as he had them, he kept himself from mentioning how _consumed_ he felt – by the Mage Underground, by the clinic, by everything that took while never giving back, the consumption never matched by reciprocation or replenishment. He could imagine being consumed by thoughts of Fenris – he _had been_ consumed by them for longer than he wanted to admit – but Fenris offered the possibility of receiving something in return, whether it was love or sex or endless, mostly good-natured arguing, though bad-natured arguing that ended in sex didn’t sound too awful either. 

_Perhaps that is where I have gone astray_ , Justice said, the rumble of his voice pensive now. _I have never had a physical body of my own or had to cater to the needs of one. I can afford to be single-minded. Though you too were single-minded once._

“And it would have destroyed me eventually, if I hadn’t met you. Granted, it would have been an incredibly _fun_ method of destruction – wine, brothels, wine _in_ brothels.” He sighed, pressing his palm against the open part of the gauntlet where Fenris’s would have been – it was too small for his hand, the spiked tips of the fingerguards barely clearing Anders’s fingertips. “Justice, is there a Vengeance? Have I corrupted you?” 

A thoughtful silence followed, in which Anders thought he could _feel_ Justice thinking, which was unsettling in itself. They shared his body – did they share his mind? Was his own brain working to respond to a question he genuinely did not know the answer to? 

_No. What you call “Vengeance” is merely me acting upon your will in ways you could not, constrained as you are by your human body. It is a convenient appellation that allows you to distance yourself from responsibility for the consequences._

Anders jerked in surprise at the response, blinking eyes that suddenly burned. Guilt gnawed at him, as deep and stabbing as hunger had been in that lonely year in the dungeon at Kinloch Hold. Another friend he had disappointed, another friend he had failed. “I’m sorry.” He thought of the wide-eyed look Fenris had given his former master, the one that had been filled with terror but also with a longing for the magister’s approval, and his stomach twisted. Was he – however inadvertently – making Justice do things against his will? Was he no better than the templars at the Circle or the slave-owners of the Imperium? Maybe he was worse, since for months he had been blaming Justice for actions that were motivated by his own anger. “I never meant to… that was never what Iintended.” 

A quiet cough roused him from his internal conversation with Justice, a monologue now that Justice had retreated… or been distracted. Anders looked up to find Fenris in the doorway, one slender hand wrapped around the doorjamb, the other clutching the winding sheet around his hips. Against the duskiness of his skin, the fabric almost looked white again, and his markings shimmered in the scant shards of sunlight that penetrated the gaps in the clinic walls. 

“My apologies for disturbing you from your… meditating?” he said, one dark brow arching toward the tousled waves of pale hair falling over his forehead. “I was looking for my….” His gaze fell on his gauntlets, still laying across Anders’s lap. Anders tightened his grip on the one he’d been cleaning, as if ready to snatch it out of Fenris’s reach like a child trying to protect a treasured toy. 

“They had blood on them,” he said stupidly. 

“They often do,” Fenris replied. The sheet dragged the floor behind him as he walked toward Anders, making a soft hushing sound like waves washing over the shore before being pulled back out to sea. 

“Far be it for me to tell you how to dress yourself – I’ve never gone in much for armor – but shouldn’t you put your trousers on _before_ you put on your murder gloves?” Anders asked. He was distantly surprised – and relieved – that he didn’t stammer, though Fenris’s approach _was_ making him uncomfortably aware that he was wearing nothing but his coat. “Not that I’m saying you should put your trousers on either.” 

He scrambled off the chair, dropping Fenris’s gauntlet on the table, and pulled his coat around him. Fenris gave him a bemused smirk, the slightest hint of an upward curl at the corner of his lips, the smallest hitch of an eyebrow. “I haven’t got anything for breakfast, but I could make tea,” Anders blurted. Why in the Maker’s name did he sound like someone had dropped an icicle down the back of his coat? He tried to remember if he’d always been so skittish after sleeping with someone – someone he cared about anyway; if it had been with _anyone_ , he would have fallen apart from the stress years ago. He supposed he had – after the first time with Karl, he’d ended up in the First Enchanter’s study for accidentally setting fire to whatever happened to be nearby every time Karl tried to speak to him, and with Nathaniel, he’d been so distracted by sending covert glances in Nathaniel’s direction that he’d almost tripped over a bloody Genlock and had been saved from a nasty end by Ser Pounce-a-lot’s quick intervention. He missed that cat. 

It was reassurance he wanted, reassurance that the other party hadn’t been disappointed or unsatisfied or _bored_ – his nerves needed soothing as if he were a fractious cat whose trust had to be won over with a gentle voice and soft scratches behind the ears. Unfortunately, Fenris was rarely the soothing type, and his scratches were likely to draw blood. 

“Not tea, really,” he blundered on. “More elfroot boiled in water. But it’ll cure the flux, if you have it.” He swallowed hard, blinking quickly as if doing so could clear the memory of his feet crossed over Fenris’s arse, feeling it clench as Fenris thrust into him. “Which you don’t, of course.” 

“Mage, are you unwell?” Fenris asked when Anders had finally stemmed the flow of his babble by catching the inside of his lower lip between his teeth. He was running his fingertip along the point of his gauntlet – maybe he’d decided to follow through on his intention of the day before and kill Anders after all? 

“Yes, of course, fine,” Anders replied. His stomach churned, squirming with nausea, and as he brushed his hand over his brow, he realized it was damp with sweat. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the lyrium again? Like the time you tried to shake hands with my liver?” Fenris’s look of concern sharpened quickly into a glare, and Anders put his hands up. “Because you _had_ to, I know. But it could be with the contact with lyrium internally, that….” he trailed off, realizing what he was saying, and pinched his brow between his thumb and forefinger. “ _Maker’s balls_.” 

“I was unaware that humans could blush all over,” Fenris said, voice drier than a Chantry sister’s coney-burrow. 

Anders tugged his gaping coat shut with a jerk, feeling himself flush hotter and – judging by the deepening smirk on the elf’s face – redder. “It’s not as bad this time. I’ll be fine.” 

“I could go and fetch the cats, if you wish.” This in a voice now so dry Anders could almost feel it drawing the moisture out of the air, as if someone were casting Cone of Cold nearby. “Since they took such excellent care of you last time.” 

“I’m sure I apologized for that,” Anders protested, cheeks still burning. “Didn’t I?” He glanced up to see the corner of Fenris’s lips curving up again, his mouth quivering as if he were stifling a laugh. “Ah, a joke. Only the resurrected Andraste herself appearing in this clinic would be a greater miracle!” 

Fenris’s chuckle reminded him of what he could remember of sipping rich, mellow whiskey on a cold night – it seemed to curl up warmly in his stomach. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, prickling like goosebumps, and he rubbed his hand over it. 

“But I should be asking you if you’re well, Fenris,” he said as the elf’s laughter dissipated and silence threatened to settle in. “Yesterday was… I’m sure it was like some kind of non-mage equivalent of a Harrowing.” 

“I… I do not know,” Fenris murmured, bowing his head so silver-white waves tumbled over his forehead, hiding his expression. “Now that some of the anger has gone away, I suppose I feel relief of a sort, to not have to run anymore or worry anymore. But I also feel… like I am sailing without a set course. Or more like I am becalmed with no course.” 

“I don’t think I can offer any useful advice there,” Anders said. “My course has always been set for me. Circle mages are told what to do; Grey Wardens fight Darkspawn and stop the Blight; and apostates hide from templars. Not much choice there.” He edged closer to the desk, reaching out to touch Fenris’s gauntlet, his fingertip running over the back of it toward Fenris’s finger, which was pressing against one of the claws as if testing its sharpness. “You can just _be_ , Fenris. Just live your life. Drink wine, kill slavers…” His finger hooked around Fenris’s briefly, squeezing it. “…fuck dashing apostates.” He dipped his head to look under the elf’s fringe – now Fenris was blushing, almost as red as Anders himself had been a moment before. 

“Perhaps they are a slave’s dreams of what freedom would be,” Fenris said. “I expected something more.” He glanced up at Anders – with his head bowed, his eyes seemed even larger looking up from beneath the sooty shade of his lashes. Anders felt the force of that gaze like a punch to the diaphragm, his breath huffing from his lungs. He swallowed hard and made himself look away, scrubbing the back of his hand over his forehead. Maybe he _was_ coming down with a fever from the lyrium after all. 

“I mean no offense,” Fenris said, that stiff formality Anders remembered from their first conscious meeting creeping back into his voice, this time with an anxious edge to it. “I wasn’t referring to _that_ when I spoke of expecting more.” The elf’s face was so flushed that the lyrium markings on his chin seemed to glow. “ _That_ was… fine.” 

Anders let out an incredulous laugh before he could stop himself. “Fine? I know you aren’t terribly effusive as a rule, but _fine_?! Well, I’ll just have to try harder next time.” 

He regretted the words as soon as he’d said them. They were stupid, presumptuous – just because _he_ wanted a next time didn’t mean that Fenris did. Fenris was free now – he had enough coin to go anywhere in Thedas and enough beauty to fuck anyone in Thedas. Why would he choose to stay in a cesspit like Kirkwall for the apparently dubious pleasure of fucking a penniless apostate who lived in a sewer? Anders quickly pasted a grin on his face, a hairsbreadth from a leer, intending to make it clear that he was teasing. 

“Next time?” Fenris replied in a low voice that almost made his toes curl. He leaned across the desk toward Anders, and the sheet slipped lower on his hips – Anders followed the lines of lyrium with his eyes, a different kind of fever beginning to grip him. He swallowed hard and forced himself to meet Fenris’s eyes. 

“If you wish it,” he stammered. “I….” He felt like an apprentice again, raw, nervous, giddy, as he’d been after the first time he and Karl had kissed over one of the duller tomes in the Tower library when they’d been supposed to be studying, that same combination of wanting desperately to be touched while fearing the lack of control, the possible embarrassment, or rejection that touch could bring. 

“I am still unused to doing things simply because I want to do them,” Fenris said. “But I _do_. I _do_ want to….” 

He started to bow his head again, to retreat behind that fall of pale hair and back into himself, but Anders reached out, cupped his chin in one hand, feeling the lyrium tickle against his fingers like a brush of phantom feathers, and kissed him. It was soft at first, a kind of supplication in the form of a kiss, an unspoken prayer for Fenris to stay in Kirkwall, stay within arm’s length, stay the way others in the past hadn’t been able to. Fenris kicked the wobbly chair out of the way, sending it skittering across the floor, and closed the distance between them, the sheet sliding from his hips and crumpling at their feet like a heap of meringue. Anders slipped his arm around Fenris’s waist, pulling him closer, as if he could hold the elf so tightly to him that the lyrium branded his flesh as well, leaving faint patterns on his skin like echoes of those on Fenris’s. His coat gapped open, their erections brushing together, and Anders groaned into the elf’s mouth, tasting his breath on his tongue as the sound was repeated back to him. 

_It wasn’t a mistake_ , Anders thought, and it made his knees buckle almost as much as the slippery friction of Fenris’s cock against his own or the flex of the elf’s fingers in his hair. _I didn’t frighten him off_. That had been the way of it – people had enjoyed his enthusiasm and, later, his skill, but had been quickly exhausted by his intensity. He still remembered the way Karl wouldn’t meet his eyes when he’d told Anders that they’d gone too fast, that though he loved Anders, it was more as he’d love a brother. With Nathaniel, it had been the words, blurted too soon, rather than the acts, and after they’d been uttered, the coldness about Nathaniel that Anders had tried so hard to thaw had returned, thicker and more impenetrable, until even the most casual touch from Anders was like hot water on frostbitten flesh to him. And yet Fenris, who had good cause to be the most skittish of all, was there now, still, was kissing him back. 

Anders pulled away, panting, tilting his head back with a smile as Fenris, letting out an irritated hiss between his teeth, craned his neck forward to kiss him again. “Fenris, did I… did I say anything last night when we were…?” His stomach felt like a sodden sponge being squeezed in a fist, worry leaching from it and seeping through him. What if he hadn’t told Fenris he loved him and had just filled in the lost time with what he _wished_ had happened? What if Fenris hadn’t been spooked and run because all he thought he was getting was mind-blowing orgasms rather than the love of a possessed apostate? 

“You say a great many things, mage,” Fenris said. “As I am sure you’re aware.” 

“Yes, I know, but….” 

With a sigh, Fenris bowed his head, resting his forehead on Anders’s shoulder. His hair tickled Anders’s chin, and he could feel the elf’s breath – hot, fast, humid – even through the fabric of his coat. “There are some things that are still new to me, mage. You should know how this is, what it’s like to be forbidden things that are commonplace to others.” Fenris lifted his head to look up at him, and when Anders met his gaze, he forgot the urgency of his own arousal, forgot everything but the pleading expression in those moss-green eyes, that need to be understood that he felt resonating within him like the clamor of a bell reverberating off stone walls. “You are better at rebelling than I was,” Fenris murmured. 

Anders grazed his knuckles over Fenris’s cheek, the elf’s eyelashes fluttering soft as moth’s wings against the pad of his thumb as he blinked. “You were better at escaping than I was,” he said, settling his fingers under Fenris’s chin and tilting his face up for another kiss. 

Justice rumbled at the back of Anders’s mind like a nagging hunger pang, and he drew away from Fenris unwillingly. “I should put the lantern out, I suppose,” he said, though – his former self reasserting himself, perhaps – there was almost nothing he’d like to do less at that moment. Staring at the soft, damp fullness of Fenris’s lower lip was preferable by far, for example, or comparing the glisten of Fenris’s sweat-sheened skin to the minute glitter of his lyrium markings. He sighed. “The clinic was closed all day yesterday as well, after all.” 

“It must be early still,” Fenris said, his voice as warm and dark as a streamer of smoke. “Let me have you a while longer.” He lifted himself onto his toes to press their lips together and darted one slender hand between them, wrapping his fingers around Anders’s cock. 

“Andraste’s brimming gravy bowl, Fenris,” Anders breathed, thrusting his hips to push himself into the elf’s hand. “If anyone knocks…” 

Fenris was leaving trails of wet kisses along his neck as he shoved Anders’s coat off his shoulders and down his arms – Anders could feel him smile against his adam’s apple as he swallowed the rest of his words. “…you’ll tell them to come back later,” Fenris finished, rubbing the underside of the head of Anders’s cock with his thumb. 

In this, as in almost everything, he didn’t know how to anticipate Fenris – one moment, the elf would act as if he were frightened or ignorant, needing guidance, and in the next, he would be seductive enough to make a desire demon question its vocation. Anders knew the _why_ of it – the effect of the abuse suffered at Danarius’s hands, and the thought brought what he called Vengeance storming forward like a herd of stampeding Druffalo. He squeezed his eyes shut to hide Vengeance’s presence from Fenris, clinging to control. Bile soured the back of his throat as he thought of benefitting from what Danarius had done, and yet… if it was Fenris’s choosing… and he _could_ choose now – he was free, and the magister was no doubt being nibbled by minnows at the bottom of a Lowtown canal. 

With a sigh of capitulation, Anders leaned toward Fenris as if he could drape himself over him like a cloak and slid his hand between them, gathering their cocks into his fist. Silently thanking the Maker that he had remembered that ridiculous grease spell from his Circle days, he cast it, and when Fenris pushed his hips upward, his erection slid easily along Anders’s. The elf groaned and buried his face against Anders’s shoulder, going still except for the rocking of his hips. Anders found Fenris’s rhythm and worked his hips in time with it, biting back his cries each time the head of his cock, dark with arousal, brushed against Fenris’s. 

The elf’s moans, throaty and thick, were rising with every stroke, until he bit down on Anders’s shoulder muscle, cutting off the sound, though Anders could still feel the heat of his breath against his skin. He didn’t particularly _like_ pain – or if he _had_ once, his year in the Kinloch Hold dungeon had broken him of it – but the pinch of Fenris’s teeth made him gulp down a cry of his own. He bowed his head to rest it on Fenris’s neck, just where it curved into his shoulder, kissing and sucking at his smooth, lyrium-seamed throat, as he grazed the cleft of the elf’s arse down to his balls lightly with his fingernails. 

It was an awkward, shuffling dance to maneuver Fenris back onto the rickety table behind him while stroking both of them in one hand. All he wanted to do was push into Fenris and fuck him until the desk fell to splinters beneath them, but the brief stiffening of Fenris’s limbs, as if he were an animal deciding between fighting or fleeing, as Anders had guided him backward made it clear that would have been disastrous. Fenris settled onto the table, hooking one leg over Anders’s hip and thrusting up into his hand, the soft skin of his cock dragging gently along Anders’s, the lyrium humming against Anders’s flesh. 

“ _Maker_ ,” Anders murmured, tightening his grip, letting Fenris thrust up into his palm and listening to the elf’s breath grow more ragged. Fenris’s cheek was pressed against his, his hot breath rushing over Anders’s ear. He turned his head and found Fenris’s open, panting mouth with his own. It was messy now, frantic, both of them too eager, kissing and licking each other’s lips, cheeks, chins, necks. 

Anders broke away, ignoring the disappointed huff from Fenris, and slowly sank to his knees, running his tongue down Fenris’s chest and stomach as he went, lightly sucking the branded skin. The lyrium seemed to crackle beneath his tongue, and he tried to muffle the pleased mutter from Justice as he let his hand trail down from Fenris’s erection, over his taut balls to the smooth skin under them. Fenris squirmed below him as if in protest, but Anders gently massaged the spot with fingers slick with grease and their mingled pre-come, and soon Fenris was arching upward as if an invisible rope had been tied around his waist and pulled. He was moaning, deep, broken, helpless moans, but when Anders glanced up, he found the elf’s lips moving as if he were forming words. Anders slowed his movements and listened, and after a while, he could make out a string of what must have been Tevene, a few curses that he only knew from Fenris directing them at him in anger, and then, “ _Kaffas, please_ , Anders.” 

He froze, trembling, and Fenris reached down to trail his fingertips along his cheekbone, so softly and carefully that Anders leaned into the gesture, eyes falling shut. Fenris had never called him by name – it was always “mage” – and hearing the name he’d accepted for himself in that voice as sweet and dark as molasses created a thunder in his head that had nothing to do with Justice, a rush of crackling heat that seemed to crisp all his nerve-endings. Still shaking, Anders grasped the base of Fenris’s cock and slid it into his mouth, taking Fenris as deep as he could without gagging. He felt overcome, as if he’d been tumbled by a wave and then tugged out to sea by the undertow. Worse, he felt like a templar in the throes of lyrium withdrawal, all trembling hands and terrible, unquenchable thirst, though this would not be sated by something as simple as a lyrium draught – only the touch and taste of Fenris’s skin, his lips, his cock, could keep this gnawing need at bay. 

Fenris groaned, his hand slipping from Anders’s cheek and plunging into his hair, fingers tangling into it, gently holding Anders’s head as he thrust upward into his mouth. Anders could taste himself, mixed with the taste of Fenris, the faint metallic, mineral tang of the lyrium and the sharp, vegetal bitterness of his come, like dandelion greens and chamomile leaves. He ran his hand along the throbbing pulse in Fenris’s groin, one fingertip following the course of the vein fluttering beneath the skin, and then up lines of muscle to his hip, before reaching for Fenris’s hand. 

Their fingers entwined, the cool effervescence of the lyrium branded into Fenris’s palm seeming to fizz against Anders’s skin, making the hair on the backs of his hand stand up. But beyond the lyrium, there was something heady, something similar to his memories of good wine, about the brush of the soft skin between Fenris’s fingers against his own, even in the pressure of Fenris’s calluses against his own smaller ones, in the simple thrill of bare skin touching bare skin. Fenris’s armor offered tantalizing glimpses of bare flesh – the lyrium-vined curves of his biceps, the faint sliver of spine, the unshod feet with their long, weirdly graceful toes – but most of that bareness was surrounded by wicked spikes of pauldron, gauntlet, vambrace. Anders doubted that Fenris stayed covered out of modesty – he’d said before the markings were impossible to hide – so it must have been a need for protection, an assertion of his sovereignty over his body. 

They’d both lived under the control of others in their different ways, and yet Anders was struck again by how completely they’d diverged from one another – his reaction to the deprivations of the Circle had been to give himself freely, perhaps _too_ freely, to anyone who showed interest or who would merely tolerate him, while Fenris had put up barriers, guarded his body and his mind fiercely from invaders, all armor, sword, and taciturnity. It was a way of living so alien to Anders that he didn’t know how to convey to Fenris that he didn’t consider him a fortress to be conquered, that with sex – and, as loath as he had been to admit it until the night before, love – giving of oneself did not mean losing or being taken from. And yet, those walls would have to be breached somehow. 

Anders had learned dozens of spells that were useful for sex during his time at the Ferelden Circle and in the brothels of Denerim – he’d even created a few himself – but looking up at Fenris, unfurled before him like a dark scroll covered in the pale script of his markings, he knew he could never use that magic on him. Well, unless Fenris _asked_ , which was another matter entirely. But he couldn’t – _wouldn’t_ – risk reminding Fenris of what he’d left behind him in Minrathous, as if the lyrium tattoos weren’t reminder enough. 

Still grasping Fenris’s hand, he slid the elf’s cock out of his mouth and kissed down the underside of it. Fenris let out a muffled grunt of disappointment that quickly dissolved into a moan as Anders ran his tongue over his balls, sucking one gently into his mouth and humming as if trying to match the pitch of the lyrium in Fenris’s skin. By the time he moved on to the other, Fenris was writhing beneath him like a water serpent, one lithely muscled thigh draping over Anders’s shoulder. He squeezed Fenris’s fingers and then dipped his head lower, darting the tip of his tongue tentatively over Fenris’s arsehole. The elf’s cries cut off as if a hand had been clapped over his mouth, his fingers curled into rigid claws around Anders’s. 

Anders turned his head and pressed a kiss against Fenris’s inner thigh, feeling the flitter of his pulse against his lips, then another on the curve of his arsecheek. Fenris smelled earthier there, muskier, and Anders buried his face against him and inhaled, his other hand dropping down to stroke himself, as if to give himself some respite from the twang of his overstimulated nerves. Panting, he swallowed hard, trying to steady himself, and brushed his lips over Fenris’s arsehole, just the barest graze of contact. Fenris’s fingers dug into the back of his hand hard enough to make tiny, bloody crescents, but the elf rolled his hips toward Anders, a liquid motion, like the rocking of a boat against a pier, and spread his legs wider. Anders dared another quick swipe with his tongue, and this time Fenris groaned, a shuddering cry that rippled through him and sent a rush of vicarious pleasure through Anders. 

He let go of his cock and brought his hand up to stroke Fenris’s, coating his fingers liberally in the remaining grease from his spell, Fenris’s pre-come, and his own spit. When he glanced up, Anders saw that the elf had his eyes squeezed shut, his black brows furrowed as if he were puzzling over a particularly difficult word in one of the books they read together, his full lips tight with the same frown of concentration. No, not concentration – _uncertainty_. Was Fenris unsure of whether he wanted to continue, or was he unsure that he should want this at all? Anders’s hand faltered on Fenris’s cock – as much as he desired Fenris, taking what someone wasn’t willing to offer, or was only willing to offer under duress, didn’t interest him at all. The elf’s eyes fluttered open and slowly focused on Anders, still glazed over with arousal. 

“If you ever want me to stop, you can just tell me,” Anders said, grazing the elf’s knuckles, white with tension, with his lips. 

“Do you think I would not simply stop you, mage?” Fenris asked. His markings flared, deepening the shadow carved into his cheek by his tiny smirk. Anders supposed the display was meant to be a warning of sorts, but as he rested his chin on the elf’s inner thigh and looked up at the brocade of lyrium intertwining on the underside of Fenris’s cock, all he could think of was the dangerous beauty of it, like the thorny tendrils of a climbing rose. He felt the brush of the Fade through the markings, soft as a lover’s breath, and Justice murmured appreciatively at the back of his head. 

“Do you think I might enjoy being stopped?” Anders asked, answering Fenris’s smirk with one of his own and bowing his head to drop a quick, apologetic kiss on Fenris’s thigh. He slipped his hand down and circled the slick tip of his finger around Fenris’s tightly clenched entrance. The thigh draped over his shoulder twitched as if Anders had shot him with a bolt from an electricity spell, all the striations in the muscle standing out in relief, briefly skewing the smooth lines of lyrium that curved over it. Fenris’s fingers tightened around his, and his palm was slippery with sweat against Anders’s. He had a sense of Fenris taking a deep breath and exhaling it slowly, and then as if with a conscious effort, the elf seemed to relax, his thighs parting further. 

Anders took Fenris deep into his mouth as he carefully slid his forefinger into him, pausing and lavishing attention on Fenris’s cock when he began to twist his hips away, then pressing farther when he stilled once more. Fenris was always nearly silent in battle, as if all his energy were focused on the business both of killing and surviving, and he was quiet now. Was this something he’d decided to merely live through rather than enjoy, like he’d lived through everything Danarius had done to him? Stomach churning, Anders started to slip his finger out of Fenris, but before he could take his hand away, Fenris’s fingers clamped down around his wrist, holding him in place. 

He glanced up, hoping to see some kind of will or intention in Fenris’s face, but the elf’s head was thrown back, leaving Anders to stare at the ladder of lyrium that climbed up his throat. Fenris was tight, but he’d been expecting that, and as he gently worked his finger in and out, Anders felt the resistance start to leach out of him as if being expelled in Fenris’s soft, breathless moans. 

Casting the grease spell again, Anders added another finger. After a moment of flicking his tongue along the underside of Fenris’s cock, letting the elf adjust to the feel of it, he began thrusting his fingers faster, though still being gentle – he recognized the smoother feel of scar tissue when his fingertips skimmed over it. The bones of his other hand creaked as Fenris clutched at it, and the elf’s stomach vibrated like a struck drum skin. Fenris trembled all over as if gripped by a fever, his hips rising jerkily to meet Anders’s hand and lips. His hand rose like an ember from a campfire, hanging in the air as if trying to decide whether to push Anders away or pull him closer. 

“ _Venhedis_ , mage!” he rasped, and his hand dropped to clutch the side of the table as he arched off of it with a ragged shout. Fenris’s come hit the back of his throat, flooding his mouth, and Anders swallowed it down as Fenris convulsed beneath him. 

Finally, Fenris went still – or _mostly_ still, a faint twitch racked him from time to time, and his chest heaved with his panting breath. Anders carefully slipped his fingers out of Fenris’s arse and his cock out of his mouth, and rested his cheek against the elf’s quiescent thigh. Tremulous fingertips brushed across his forehead and over his temple into his hair. 

“I would think you had used magic on me, but I know you did not,” Fenris said, his voice quivering; he sounded winded, as if he’d just been fighting waves of Darkspawn… except Fenris rarely got winded doing that. 

“I _could_ , if you asked me,” Anders murmured. “I’m _very_ talented, you know.” 

Fenris chuckled, that rich, dark laugh that was like chocolate from Rivain, like the gold-tooled leather on the books in the Tower library, and he slid liquid as quicksilver from his perch on the desk and into Anders’s lap. It was like receiving an unexpected gift still bundled up in its wrappings – he handled Fenris gingerly, holding him loosely, fingertips skimming over his spine, even as he reveled in the weight of him, the warmth of the elf’s breath against his neck as he spoke. 

“So you’ve told me many times,” Fenris replied, then gave one of his polite little coughs. “I believe you now, mage.” The humid warmth of his lips pressed against his throat, just where his pulse still throbbed, before Fenris raised his head and looked him in the eyes. “You do not have to be so careful with me, though. I will not break.” 

Anders blinked – he was still unused to direct, prolonged eye contact with Fenris and he felt naked in the intensity of that stare. Well, _more_ naked. Not that he was one to hide much from those he trusted – or even just those he wanted to fuck – and yet still he could feel heat rising in his cheeks. “I know that. Of course I know that. But maybe I want to be?” An echoing flush darkened Fenris’s face, and he looked away, which somehow made it much easier to speak. Anders combed away the sweat-damp hair webbing Fenris’s forehead with his fingertips, feeling the minute hammer of the elf’s blood in his temples. He swallowed hard before he said, “Someone was careful with me once, and it made all the difference.” 

He thought of those early days at the Circle when he’d refused to speak, when he’d had no name to answer to, when all he’d thought of was running. And then a boy, a few years older with eyes the soft blue-gray of the morning mist curling over Lake Calenhad, had begun talking to him, not seeming to expect or require a response, almost offhandedly. _Karl_. Anders hadn’t answered, but he’d listened, and he’d heard no taunting, no sneering, as he’d heard from the others. Karl would leave extra oatcakes on his pillow, an apple on the shelf by his bed where he kept his meager belongings, a freshly sharpened quill on his desk, never seeming to expect anything in return. 

Fenris left gifts for him too, but it was different – Karl had done it to take the burden of gratitude, even a mumble of thanks, off of Anders, whereas Fenris seemed to leave his offerings so he wouldn’t have to see the possible rejection of them. Anders’s eyes stung as he remembered the handful of feathers wrapped in a scrap of fabric that Fenris had so shyly unwrapped. He bowed his head to kiss the shallow well at the center of Fenris’s clavicle, hoping to hide the redness of his eyes. The tip of his nose grazed the lyrium branded into Fenris’s throat, and he felt Fenris start against him as if he’d been pricked with a pin. 

“And I just….” Anders gulped, struggling to swallow down the hard, bitter taste of bile that had flooded over his tongue. “I don’t want you to think of _him_. Ever, but especially not when you’re with me.” He almost choked on the words as he forced them out. “I never want to remind you of him.” 

“You couldn’t,” Fenris said, voice low and fierce, his words trampling over Anders’s before they’d barely come out. “You… you are kind. Selfless.” 

“Handsome?” Anders suggested, hiding his smile against the curve of muscle that flowed from Fenris’s neck into his shoulder. 

“Yes,” Fenris replied, and it sounded as if he were smiling too. He trailed his hand down Anders’s chest and stomach, resting it on his prick for a moment as if waiting to feel it stiffen beneath his palm. Anders gasped at the touch, resting his forehead on Fenris’s shoulder and watching as the elf’s slender fingers slowly wrapped around his rapidly hardening cock. “And stubborn and infuriating and self-righteous….” he continued, punctuating each word with a stroke of Anders’s erection. 

“But definitely handsome?” Anders persisted, his voice trembling now. 

Fenris laughed, that dry chuckle that had once reminded Anders of an old shutter swaying in the wind on rusted hinges but that now sounded to his ears like lowest note on a lute being strummed. “It’s the only explanation for such vanity,” he said and kissed Anders, as if to take the sting out of the words. 

“And my cock doesn’t look like a nug,” Anders murmured, not bothering to scour the smugness from his voice. 

He felt Fenris’s laugh as much as he heard it, as a rumble in his chest, a warm tumble of breath against his neck. But when Fenris spoke again, his voice was serious, hard as a slab of marble, at odds with the languid caressing motion of his hand on Anders’s erection. “He is not your demon to cast out,” he said. “You have one of your own.” 

Anders’s stomach clenched, the muscles in his abdomen tightening as if to guard against a punch. Anger threatened to tamp out the slowly building smolder of arousal, but Justice was oddly quiet. The spirit usually receded at times like these after making his objections known or saving them for later, and Anders could sense his presence, but the expected indignation at being called a demon never arrived. If anything, he felt Justice retreat even more, that omnipresent judging gaze averted. 

“He’s not….” Anders protested weakly, but Fenris stoppered his words with another kiss, and after a moment, he gave himself over entirely to the feel of Fenris’s hand on his cock, the flicker of Fenris’s tongue over his own. How different this was from the first time that Fenris had brought him off, and he wondered if perhaps the difference was that Fenris _wanted_ to do it rather than feeling obligated to. Even after so many years, he could still remember the moment when Karl’s touch had begun to feel more like an obligation than actual passion or love. 

He came into Fenris’s hand with a groan, and they collapsed against one another, a precarious structure, each holding the other’s weight. That was how everything with Fenris felt – _precarious_ – not because he was unsure of his love for the elf, but because it all seemed so conditional. Fenris’s very being seemed conditional, winking in and out of existence, phasing through solid objects, a lyrium ghost, and his presence in Anders’s life seemed constantly balanced on the finely honed edge of a blade. One wrong word, one argument that couldn’t be soothed away with a few knee-weakening kisses, and Fenris would be gone. With Karl, everything had been so certain, and not just because they’d thought they would both spend the rest of their lives at the Ferelden Circle – their love had had the intuitive sureness born from growing up together, and bolstering it a deep, unbreakable trust that had survived when romantic love hadn’t. 

But now, as he rested his forehead against Fenris’s, he realized that the man he’d used to be would not have fallen in love with Fenris at all. At best, he would have fucked him just because Fenris was pretty and then gone about his life; at worst, he would’ve considered Fenris a stubborn fool and wished he could shoot lightning at him. Or, perhaps more realistically, he would have annoyed Fenris and ended up with his heart ticking out its last seconds in the elf’s gauntleted fist. It was Justice who had given him the patience, he supposed – he hadn’t experienced love since merging with the spirit. Justice, who in spite of his misgivings and warnings and disapproval, had made him able to love Fenris. With a shiver, he draped his arms around Fenris and brushed his lips over the elf’s, inhaling the sharp, clean odor of his sweat, as if he could somehow anchor Fenris into existence, into his life, by touching him, tasting him, smelling him. 

Justice was still withdrawn, quiet, and when Anders whispered, “Thank you” to the spirit in his head, he was answered with silence. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies again for the delay with this week's chapter! Next week's will be up on the usual day. Thanks for reading!


	22. Chapter 22

_This is madness_ , Fenris thought as he brushed his fingertips along Anders’s shoulder, marveling as he always did at the firmness of the muscle, the indentation where it met the bone, so at odds with the lanky figure the mage cut when fully clothed. _This is madness, and I am a fool. To vanquish one dragon only to put myself in the jaws of another._ Anders shifted against him, his faint snores that almost sounded like the burbling coo of a dove pausing as he sighed, his breath so warm that it seemed to condense on the side of Fenris’s neck. His warm, _living_ breath.

He turned his head toward Anders, toward the metallic smell of human blood still clumped in his hair, and watched the shift and dart of the mage’s eyes behind the thin, faintly shining cloaks of his eyelids. Carefully, not wanting to jostle Anders from his dreams – not least because they didn’t seem to be nightmares – he ran his fingers over the clean, unbroken skin of Anders’s temple, where only a few hours before, it had gaped like a yawning mouth. _If I am mad, he is too_ , Fenris thought, with a mixture of fondness, frustration, and near-disgust. Of course any man who let a spirit inhabit their body was mad. Any man who tried to fight a one-man war against the templars, the Chantry, poverty, and death itself was mad. 

But of late, it seemed that all of Kirkwall was mad – or _madder_. The Viscount languished in his Keep with a mysterious wasting illness that no Circle mages could cure – though Anders was certain _he_ could – and the streets ran with rumors the way they usually did with rats, rumors that the Qunari, through the Viscount’s son, were poisoning him in a bid to claim Kirkwall in the name of the Qun. Whispers came from Sundermount of a Varterral stalking the mountain’s caves, feasting on the Dalish hunters. And Anders insisted that Knight-Commander Meredith was planning something… which Fenris would usually have dismissed as paranoia. But after Anders had turned up the previous night at the mansion’s cellar door, out of breath, face streaked with blood, one pauldron almost bereft of feathers, and one boot missing, his skin still crackling with flashes of Justice’s blue, even Fenris had to admit that perhaps there was some kernel of truth in Anders’s worries. 

“ _Venhedis_ , mage, what happened to you?” he asked, sweeping his eyes over Anders to look for further wounds, the irony of it sharp as a pinprick – after all, Anders was usually the one checking for injuries, always palpating, prodding with those gentle hands. 

He could have easily guessed the answer, so it was no surprise when Anders gasped, “Templars,” as he limped through the cellar door. 

Perhaps it had been some remnant of his years as Danarius’s bodyguard that made Fenris’s first instinct grabbing up his sword and running out into the streets to hunt down the templars who had torn Anders’s clinic apart, but fear, fear more intense than he could remember ever feeling, rooted him to the crumbling tiles of the cellar floor, his arms feeling almost too weak to help Anders up the stairs. Was fear for another always more paralyzing, he wondered, as Anders sagged against him. Even with his memory mostly restored, he could not recall ever being gripped by such an abject terror as when he’d seen the pale oval of Anders’s face emerging from the gloom of the tunnels, ribboned with bright blood. 

Fenris settled Anders into the armchair in front of the fire and paced a quick, indecisive circle around him for a moment, weighing what to do and trying to work out the nervous energy that told him to fight. 

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked. “You’re bleeding.” He gestured toward the cut on Anders’s temple, for a brief, confusing moment wishing that magic would leap from his fingertips and seal the torn flesh shut. 

Anders nodded, though his silence was proof to Fenris of how shaken he was. With a sigh, Fenris gathered Mister Pudding-Paws up from the bed and dropped the cat into Anders’s lap. After a moment, Anders sank his fingers into the cat’s striped fur, and his breathing seemed to slow and even out as he stroked Mister Pudding-Paws’s back. Fenris dragged the other armchair closer and perched on the edge of it, his eyes never leaving the mage. If Anders noticed his staring, he gave no sign – his head was bowed, golden strands of hair that had sprung loose from their tie veiling his expression. 

“Would some wine help?” Fenris chewed on his lip thoughtfully – he had no experience with taking care of someone else. He had served Danarius, often at the magister’s capricious whim, but that was merely following directions, nothing born out of goodwill or solicitude. “Would Justice allow it this time?” he asked hesitantly. 

The mage glanced up, though not at Fenris, and cocked his head to one side, as if he were straining to hear voices in another room. “Yes,” he said finally, “wine would be acceptable.” His voice sounded calmer, though the low rumble of Justice running below it like an underground river explained why. 

Still, fetching a bottle from the cellar and pouring Anders a gobletful gave Fenris something to do that at least _felt_ useful. When his fingers brushed over Anders’s while handing him the glass, he let them rest there a moment, just reassuring himself with the heat of the mage’s skin, the faint movement of ligaments and bone as Anders curved his hand around the goblet. He felt his cheeks flush as his fingertips lingered, still uncertain about touching Anders without any reason than to comfort both of them. It seemed absurd. He’d been balls deep in the man more than once – a realization that made his face flame even hotter – so why should he still feel awkward about touching him, simply because Anders had insisted he was well and seemed to not need or want Fenris’s aid? 

He jerkily curled his fingers away from Anders’s hand as if burned and turned his attention to the gash on the mage’s forehead, swallowing hard, the wine he’d sipped souring on his tongue. Even the lightest graze of his fingertips over it made them come away wet with blood, and he resisted the urge to wipe it on the upholstery of the armchair. Blood had never unsettled him – he wouldn’t have survived long if it had – but he hated the sticky warmth of Anders’s on his fingers, the darkening red streak of it smeared down the mage’s pale cheek, dulling the aged bronze gleam of his stubble. 

“Heal yourself, mage,” he said, trying to soften it from sounding like the demand it was. 

“It’s nothing,” Anders insisted, though he hissed in pain at the touch. “I bumped my head on a beam in the tunnels. Can’t even blame this one on the templars.” 

“Heal yourself or I’ll stitch you up myself,” Fenris said. He pulled an old handkerchief – one he’d taken from Anders after replacing it with a new one he’d bought in Hightown – out of his belt pouch and dabbed at the blood. 

Anders tilted his head up to smile at him, eyes warm and amber as brandy, the crinkles at the corners of them cracking the dried blood. “You did an excellent job sewing the feathers on my coat,” he replied. Then the smile slid from his face, and he looked down at the ruined pauldron, bare as a plucked goose, and sighed. 

“This is why I can’t have nice things,” he murmured, a bitter smirk crooking his lips. He rubbed his brow, tugging the skin just hard enough to break the cut open again, a thread of bright red blood unspooling from it. Not that Anders noticed – he seemed surprised when Fenris pressed the handkerchief harder against his temple to staunch the flow. 

To Fenris’s relief, a moment later, a cool wave of healing magic washed over his fingertips and trickled through the lyrium in his hand. When he tried to wipe the flakes of dried blood from Anders’s cheek, the mage turned his head, catching Fenris’s hand in his and kissing the palm. 

“Thank you, love,” he murmured, his breath warming the coolness left by his healing spell. “It’s been so long since I felt I could depend on anyone.” His voice hitched, and Fenris’s heart seemed to pause in his chest along with it. “So long since anyone worried about me _for_ me.” 

“You _do_ need a minder,” Fenris said, his throat tight, “if you can do this much damage to yourself by accident.” He swallowed again, almost a gulp, willing the churning of his stomach to still. He felt strangely awed and nauseated by Anders’s words, by watching the mage delicately kissing his fingertips one by one – it was not unlike how he’d felt when he’d seen Anders delivering a Fereldan refugee woman’s baby. Only now there was fear in it too, fear and a gush of adrenaline like that which had flooded through him when he’d had to fight in tournaments to please Danarius and make the other magisters covet his former master’s prized pet. 

Then, he had feared failing his master, for one failure meant punishment and anything beyond that meant that his usefulness to Danarius was at an end beyond the gold that the lyrium in his skin could buy. Now, though, he feared being unworthy of Anders’s love for him, no matter how much he doubted the thought had even crossed Anders’s mind, Anders who seemed so desperate for affection of any kind. He wanted to be the man that Anders saw, not for Anders – the mage had more than enough of his own faults to hold anyone to too high a standard – but for himself. 

Anders gave a half-hearted laugh and let go of his hand. “Yes, well, I’m sure I couldn’t find a better one, lo—Fenris,” he said lightly, his voice flimsy as scraped silk. Fenris’s stomach dropped. They had been the wrong words, as always. He had noticed Anders biting his tongue to hold himself back in the past, to spare Fenris the discomfort, the burden of a response. It was so contrary to the mage’s nature that his face contorted a bit with the effort, a crinkle of the nose, a twitch of the lips. There had been looks too, apprehensive but not fearful as they had once been or even worried, as if Fenris were a skittish animal and Anders was trying to determine which way he’d bolt. 

Now they seemed to be gauging him somehow, like the strange water-filled glass tube with small glass bulbs full of colored liquid floating inside that Danarius had had in his study in Minrathous. The magister had eventually told him that the metal tags on the glass bulbs marked the temperature of the air, but Fenris had been fascinated by those tiny buoyant worlds, rising and falling slowly as day turned to night and back. It was as if Anders were watching him for some kind of change, for something to rise or sink in Fenris’s expressions that he could read and understand. But those expressions, especially for one trained for impassivity, did not come to him any easier when being observed than the words did. 

Satisfied that Anders was no longer actively bleeding, Fenris sat down in his armchair again, scooting it closer to Anders’s, close enough that one of his knees slotted easily between the mage’s, the warmth of Anders’s thighs radiating through the thin spirit hide of Fenris’s leggings, though they weren’t touching. Anders often accused him of being like one of the cats, nonchalantly settling himself close by but never initiating any contact, as if to passively sap his body heat, though Fenris had pointed out that the cats weren’t shy at all – Soporatus had plopped himself down for a nap on the small of Anders’s back while he had been lying between Fenris’s legs sucking him off, and the cat had refused to be dislodged even by the mage shaking with laughter. 

Anders seemed lost in thought now, half-full goblet of wine listing in his hand, and when he finally spoke, Fenris wasn’t sure if he expected a response, his voice soft, distant, musing, Justice echoing in it like a gale in the treetops. “Why now?” Anders asked. “They never tried before. They never dared. The Fereldans weren’t an anthill worth kicking to them… so why now?” 

“But you have had troubles before, have you not?” Fenris asked. A small knot of guilt was tightening in his gut – he should have been there, guarding the clinic as he had before. What was a squad of templars compared to an entire village of Fog Warriors? 

The mage’s gaze focused on his face, sharp and clear as an expertly cut topaz, though his eyelashes fluttered a few times, as if he were surprised that Fenris was there. “From the Carta and the Coterie, yes. But they just wanted protection money.” He frowned. “Though I’ve never figured out what they were being paid to protect the clinic from, since they’re never around when it’s threatened.” 

“Themselves, I imagine,” Fenris replied. “Or each other.” 

Anders let out a laugh that sounded cut off halfway out of his throat. “I guess you can drag the boy off the farm, but you can’t drag the farm out of the boy,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know where Lirene’s lookouts were either,” he went on, seriousness hardening his face like an Orlesian mask. “If I hadn’t been in the storeroom and able to duck into the tunnels, they would have gotten me for sure. As it was, I just hid in the mouth of the tunnel and tried to keep Justice from rushing in and killing all of them. All I could do was listen to them smash everything and then pray to the bloody Maker when they were done.” He shook his head. “Meredith must be planning something. Lirene told me that the templars raided the Alienage last week, looking for a Dalish apostate. They didn’t find her, so they hanged her neighbors from the Vhenadahl. The neighbors hadn’t even known she was a mage!” Anders scrubbed his hand over his face and darted an apologetic look at Fenris, his eyelashes fluttering with a disconcerted blink at the blankness of Fenris’s expression. He was angry that innocents had been murdered, but the fact that they were elves did not make that anger any sharper. City elves from the Free Marches meant nothing more to him than anyone else. 

With a sigh, Anders leaned back into the armchair, tilting his head back, baring the long, pale curves of this throat, still flushed pink at the base. “Maybe that cheap knockoff of Andraste’s crown that holds her brain in her skull finally gave up the ghost? She’s trying to blame the Viscount’s illness on mages too, have you heard?” he asked, though his words were directed at the hole in the ceiling that dust and starlight rained through. “She’s blaming the Circle mages for failing to heal him, saying that it’s proof that magic is the cause of whatever is ailing him. And the Chantry is blaming the Qunari. You’d think they’d be able to get their story straight. It’s like a body that doesn’t know that one of its arms is flailing around… and unfortunately that arm is carrying a sword.” 

Fenris reached out and gave the featherless pauldron of Anders’s coat a gentle tug. “So how did this happen if you hid in the tunnel?” he asked, hoping to nudge Anders away from the subject of the Knight-Commander and the Chantry. If Anders had been able to keep Justice leashed and muzzled during the raid, perhaps it meant he had finally achieved some control over the spirit, though Fenris knew that control was likely fragile as an eggshell. 

“Oh,” Anders murmured, a sheepish look coming over his face, his cheeks faintly pinkening. “I had hung it up in the clinic earlier to work on a patient, and when the templars left, I snuck back out and grabbed it. One of the bastards had cleaned his boot on it.” 

“Your loyalty to that thing is… admirable,” Fenris said. “For reasons I have yet to determine.” 

“It was a foolish risk,” Anders said, which coming from anyone else would have meant “completely suicidal” – Anders’s self-preservation instincts, perhaps because of his connection to Justice, were spotty at best. “They had posted a guard outside the clinic.” His teeth worried at the row of shiny indentations in his chapped lower lip where he’d bitten it before, but Fenris could see the corner of his lips twitching, as if he were fighting back that particular coy smile of his. If Justice hadn’t been able to break Anders of that, Fenris doubted that a few templars would either. Unless they captured him and… no, Fenris wouldn’t let himself even think it. 

“You know,” Anders said, his voice as soft and slippery as the satin of one of Danarius’s gaudy robes, “it was the thought of you that kept me from letting Justice slaughter the templars.” Anders frowned, his eyelids half-shuttering his eyes, and Fenris once again got the sense that he was listening to something that Fenris could not hear. “I mean, I would regret that the people of Darktown would lose their healer and the Mage Underground one of its members,” he amended, but then he reached out and laced his fingers through Fenris’s. “But to never see you again – and the possibility that you would never know what had become of me – I couldn’t bear that, love.” 

Fenris felt heat wash over his cheeks, thankful that the flicker of the fire was low enough to conceal his blushing. He wasn’t comfortable with words the way Anders was. Oh, he knew the polite forms for Tevinter society, the correct salutations and etiquette, but those words were anonymous, impersonal – they had nothing to do with _him_ , since part of their very purpose was to show the one being addressed that he had no identity. Slaves did not. And so any words about how he felt – physical well-being aside, since that was the only aspect of a slave’s well-being that _was_ important – queued up uncomfortably on his tongue, lost their nerve and were swallowed back down. 

_Slaves are not permitted to love_ , he told himself. _Slaves are not permitted to worry about the needs of anyone except their master_. But he knew that wasn’t true either. He could remember his mother’s love now. Once, he’d believed that in becoming Fenris, his ability to love had been burned out of him as the lyrium had been burned in, though that too had turned out to be false. He loved the memory of his mother. He had, in a way, loved the Fog Warriors who had nursed him back to health on Seheron. He even had some remnant of love for Varania, like a hard, shriveled seed that he’d buried in barren soil and never watered. But no matter how many times he told himself that he was free, still the words would not come. 

So he tried to show Anders rather than tell him. Fenris had always been able to rely on his body – it had won him the tournament that had earned him the markings he had apparently wanted; it had survived Hadriana’s punishments and privations; it had carried him away from the Imperium and killed those who tried to take him; it had torn out Danarius’s throat. Now he put it to work hefting crates of potion bottles, helping to lift patients at the clinic, carrying Anders himself to bed when the mage overtaxed himself with healing. 

Even now, after cleaning the blood from Anders’s face and plying him with wine and cats to soothe his nerves – though he had to admit he was more shaken than the mage – the words he couldn’t make himself speak coated his tongue like the bitter taste of one of Anders’s potions. _I fear for you. I want to protect you. I love you_. And all he could do was lean over and kiss Anders and hope that his lips were more eloquent than his voice. 

When Anders settled back into his chair again, his sigh sounded more contented than before, though firelight still caught on the fine furrows in his forehead, turning them to shallow canals of shadow. Fenris reached across and gently pressed them with the pad of his thumb, as if he could soothe them away or absorb some of Anders’s exhaustion into himself. The map of blue cracks flickered over the mage’s face briefly, and Fenris felt the lyrium in his fingers itch. _Justice_. Well, he supposed, perhaps spirits needed soothing too. _Imbecile_ , he thought. _Next you’ll be wanting to give a blighted abomination a cuddle_. But hadn’t he been doing just that for weeks now? He let his hand drop back into his lap. 

“If I could just speak to Orsino,” Anders muttered. “He must know _something_ of what she’s planning. His bloody office is right across from hers, and you can’t tell me that that blighted harpy keeps her voice down. But he’s been sequestered in the Gallows for weeks…” 

“…And you certainly cannot go to him,” Fenris finished. 

“But _you_ could,” Anders said, eyes bright and eager in way they hadn’t been since he’d appeared at the cellar door. It was like watching an ember try to catch on wet wood – Fenris understood that desperate need for hope of any kind, but it didn’t make the idea of going to the Gallows any more palatable. He preferred to remain as ignorant as possible of Anders’s work with the Mage Underground – he couldn’t fully support mages living completely unfettered of any authority, but he also despised the powerlessness he felt, that he couldn’t protect Anders when he was smuggling Circle mages out from under the templars’ noses. But he hadn’t even been able to protect Anders at the clinic. 

“You don’t think I’d attract attention?” Fenris asked. “A lyrium-branded elf in the Gallows? I might come back to Hightown with a crowd of templars on my heels trying to… _lick_ me.” 

Anders laughed, a short, uncharacteristically subdued laugh, and Fenris thought he saw a quick glimmer of blue in his eyes. “I think they prefer to take theirs in liquid form, not in elf skin form.” He cleared his throat, a hint of red staining the crests of his cheekbones. “Then again, who knows what kind of proclivities these Kirkwall templars have?” 

“I’d rather not find out,” Fenris replied. “But if I can be of assistance….” What else could he offer Anders after all, if not this small errand? 

“You can!” Anders blurted. “You would.” He leaned forward and squeezed Fenris’s thigh just above the knee, fingers avoiding the lyrium brands as if he could see them through Fenris’s clothes. Perhaps by now he’d memorized them. “Thank you, Fenris.” 

“But what reason would I give for seeing the First Enchanter?” Fenris asked. “I don’t think they’ll believe it’s a monthly elf meeting.” 

Faint lines, as if drawn by a well-sharpened pencil, appeared again in Anders’s broad forehead, and he nibbled on the corner of his lips in thought. “Maybe you could say you are asking after your sister?” he suggested slowly, but then, perhaps seeing the disgusted curl of Fenris’s lips, rushed on. “I normally wouldn’t suggest such a thing, even for someone like Varania, but she must be long gone from the Free Marches by now, so what would be the harm? And once you were in Orsino’s office, all you’d have to do would be to hand him the letter and wait for him to write a response.” 

“Very well.” He thought of the cold stone and iron portcullises of the Gallows, isolated on its own island in the bay, and wondered if he would even wish such a life on his sister. The place was a prison – there was no other description that fit – and perhaps _she_ deserved to be there, but the children he’d rescued from and then returned to the Gallows had not. Maybe they would someday, but not yet. “I could also start guarding the clinic again, if you’d like. If you’re planning to go back eventually.” 

Anders gave him a tired smile and sank back into the armchair with a sigh. “Thank you, Fenris.” He stared past Fenris, off into the corner of the room, but he didn’t seem to be seeing the cobwebs shivering in the drafts from the holes in the ceiling. After a long moment, he sighed again, so heavily that he seemed to deflate, the remaining feathers on his coat fluttering with the rise and fall of his shoulders. “But what could you do other than be hanged for helping an apostate?” 

Icy fingers seemed to grip Fenris’s skull, his scalp crinkling at the hollow flatness of the mage’s voice. He tried to smile, giving one shoulder what he hoped was a carefree shrug. “I would simply phase through the rope if they tried,” he said. 

Anders’s laugh was low and husky, so at odds with the customary crispness of his voice, but his eyes didn’t change at all – they were as cold as an unlit hearth, and no smile lines creased the corners of them. Fenris hated that dagger of worry that twisted in his gut when he looked at Anders and hated even more his own hesitance when it came to offering help. One did not tell one’s master that he looked tired and ask if he wanted to lie down, though, lest it be construed as pointing out his weakness, and what good would it have been to ask his mother or Varania if they would like to take a rest, when he knew they could not? 

“You cannot go back to the clinic tonight, so you may as well sleep here,” he said finally. “You look terrible.” 

“Ah, I think I’ve figured out what you can do at the clinic, Fenris,” Anders replied, the tiniest of grins hitching up the corners of his mouth. “Your bedside manner puts mine to shame.” 

“If that’s how you feel, I’ll leave you to fluff your own pillow,” Fenris said, feeling a smile loosen some of the worried tension in his face. He rose from his chair and picked the lamp up from the table, suddenly very conscious of Anders’s eyes on him, of the reflection of the lamp’s flame bobbing lazily in them like fireflies. “Do you require anything else?” 

“Just you, love,” Anders said. Fenris ducked his head and lowered the lamp to hide the blush that swept over his face – he felt like an over-tuned lute string, vibrating on the point of snapping. He busied himself with setting the lamp on the small table by the bed where Anders preferred it and pulling back the blanket. 

Anders gently nudged Mister Pudding-Paws awake and waited for the cat to hop out of his lap before standing and stretching. A yawn made the rest of the dried blood on his face crack and rain down in a shower of rusty flakes. Fenris watched him, raking his eyes over the mage’s worn, grayish tunic to search it for bloodstains when he shrugged out of his coat and hung it over the back of the armchair. The fire burning in the hearth behind him limned him in gold, giving his hair the color and shine of a freshly scrubbed copper pot, and he had the stained, age-yellowed pillow his mother had given him tucked under his arm. _Of course he would have taken that with him_ , Fenris thought. Other than his coat and his manifesto – which Fenris had no doubt was shoved somewhere in said coat – the pillow was the only material possession that seemed to mean anything to Anders. 

“Mage, are you certain you are well?” Fenris asked. 

“Believe me, Fenris, I’ve had much worse than this before,” Anders replied. “Have you ever seen a Broodmother?” 

“But from templars?” Fenris persisted, hating himself for it, for making the mage recall what he’d risked his life and traveled leagues to forget, but at the same time needing some kind of assurance that helping Anders – and through him, mages – was somehow right. And yet it felt like cutting open a snake bite and trying to suck the poison from the wound – all it did was hurt Anders more and bring some of the venom into himself, even as most of it continued to race through the mage’s veins. 

“Ah,” Anders said. When he went on, his voice had a false brightness to it, like a reflection of a candle’s flame in a mirror, all lightness but no warmth. “Well, I suppose they had to keep their sword arms conditioned when on guard duty in the dungeon.” He brushed past Fenris and stretched out on the bed, looking up at him expectantly. 

Fenris sank down onto the mattress beside him, leaning almost unconsciously into the mage’s warmth. After a moment, his hand, as if of its own accord, rose and began combing through Anders’s hair, the fine silkiness of it slipping through his fingers. The mage sighed, sounding almost contented somehow, and shifted closer to him. 

“Talk to me, Fenris,” he said, drowsiness beginning to blur the edges of his words. “Perhaps it’ll help me sleep.” 

“Are you saying I’m dull?” Fenris asked, making his voice as flat as possible. 

Anders snickered into the pillow. “No, of course not. Maker’s arse, you’re really going to make me….” He took a deep, exasperated-sounding breath and said, “Your voice is… comforting, all right? I didn’t always think so, you know. I used to think you ate gravel every day for breakfast and was concerned about the state of your bowels.” 

“That explains a lot,” Fenris replied, biting back a smile as Anders shivered with silent laughter next to him. 

“ _Maker’s dangly bits_ ,” Anders gasped, out of breath. In the dimness, Fenris watched the mage’s face still and grow sober. “Perhaps you could read something? And I’ll be too tired to pester you with my corrections, so you won’t get annoyed with me. It’ll be beneficial for both of us.” 

“You assume there is a time when I’m _not_ annoyed with you, mage,” Fenris said, but he reached for the book of children’s stories on the small table beside the bed all the same. He tried to puzzle through a few of them every night when Anders wasn’t around – he still felt foolishly ashamed at having to read a book intended for children, but it was better than attempting the long-winded nonsense in Anders’s handwriting that the mage shoved under his nose when they did reading lessons at the clinic. The tiniest splinter of guilt pricked at him when he hoped that the templars had burned or at least torn those ink-splotched pages. He thumbed through the book, trying to avoid the stories that were about elves or mages or that were set in the Imperium, finally settled on a rather silly one about a cat, and began to read. 

Anders quickly fell into an exhausted sleep, relaxing against him as he read haltingly. Fenris carefully set the book down and crept out of bed, smiling to himself when Anders frowned in his sleep as the mattress pitched beneath him. He gathered the mage’s coat from the armchair, a needle and thread from the wardrobe, and a handful of feathers from Knight-Commander Meowedith’s hoard, and stole back to the bed, perching on the edge of it to be in the circle of light cast by the lamp. Cursing under his breath each time the needle stabbed his fingers, he sewed the feathers back onto the ruined pauldron of Anders’s coat and, thinking of the scrolling embroidered words on the front of Anders’s beloved pillow, wished that the needle and thread were pen and ink spelling out phrases that he couldn’t say but that the mage could understand.


	23. Chapter 23

A cutting wind from the Waking Sea serrated the surface of the harbor, and though the gale held the breath of the Ferelden winter in it, the sun still struck sparks off the water like a blade hitting plate armor. Fenris wrapped his borrowed cloak around him – Kirkwall was not far south, but it was farther south than Minrathous, and he was still unused to any chill in the air – and slouched against the mast of the small ferry. The ferryman kept giving him odd looks, half fear – for the cloak couldn’t cover all of his markings – and half smirking condescension at Fenris’s hunched-over pose. The fool probably thought him seasick. Fenris had traveled much farther by ship than this fellow in his listing pinnace with its half-rotten hull. How different this short, choppy journey was from the languid pleasure barge cruises Danarius had taken him on in the Imperium, floating down warm rivers that undulated like oil.

He almost wished he were on one of those barges with Danarius now – _almost_ – rather than sailing toward his actual destination. Fenris squinted against the slashes of wind at the square-shouldered fortress of the Gallows with its perpetual halo of tattered, murky fog. He did not fear templars – he had no reason to – but he did not have any love for them either. Once, he might have respected them or thought that they were performing an important service by protecting the public from dangerous mages. But after helping Anders, Lirene, and the Fereldan women who volunteered at the clinic sweep up potion bottles smashed by mailed fists and right furniture overturned by booted feet, Fenris’s respect had shrunk to nothing. Perhaps the templars _did_ perform a necessary function – mages _were_ dangerous, after all, even if he was no longer sure if Anders was… though sometimes he wondered if Anders were perhaps not one of the most dangerous of all – but in Kirkwall, at least, the templars applied their laws with too broad a stroke. Was an apostate healer not less of a danger than a known blood mage? And yet the templars behaved as if there were no difference… and in the past, Fenris would no doubt have agreed with them. Worse, the templars in Kirkwall had been infected with their Knight-Commander’s paranoia, seeing a blood mage in a midwife, a potion seller, a dealer in grenades… what would they make of a lyrium-marked elf? 

But he had promised Anders. 

The panicked coos of a pigeon and the hectoring clatter of gulls roused Fenris from his thoughts, and he looked up to find two gulls snapping at the pigeon with their bright yellow beaks as it trundled its way back toward the shore. Its gray feathers spiraled down to the water like flecks of ash. As he watched, an osprey swooped down on one of the seagulls, white-striped wings spread wide, talons extended. The bird let out a somehow forlorn, whistling shriek as it attacked, and soon the deck of the boat was strewn with silver-tipped seagull feathers, white as the moon, stippled faintly with blood. Fenris gathered them up, trying to avoid the ferryman’s attention, and slipped them into his belt pouch next to the folded letter he carried for Anders. _White as moonlight on snow_ , Anders had said once, combing his fingers through Fenris’s hair. Fenris had never seen snow close up before, but Anders had told him about the frigid days on the shore of Lake Calenhad, the way the snow squeaked under your feet if you stepped on it the right way, how the blue-white gleam of moonlight glancing off of it had been the only light in his cell on the long winter nights. The Gallows seemed to loom even more as Fenris remembered the way Anders’s hands, usually so steady, had shaken as he spoke of his time in the dungeon at Kinloch Hold. 

The boat bumped against the stone step of the dock. Fenris pulled up the hood of his cloak and leapt out over the low prow. From the bottom of the stairs that led up to the Gallows Courtyard, he could just make out the weak sun gleaming off the bowed heads of the golden statues hanging from the columns. When he’d first come to Kirkwall, he’d mistaken them for mages, hiding their faces in shame and fear, but now he knew them for what they were: _slaves_. They’d been intended to break the spirits of newly arrived slaves, and as Fenris trudged up the steps, he wondered if they had been left behind when the Imperium had deserted Kirkwall and the Templar Order had taken over this island fortress to have the same effect on mages. 

He couldn’t look away from the contorted figures as he entered the courtyard, trying to keep to the shadows among the columns, a heavy weight bearing down on him as if a strong arm were trying to hold him in place. His heart seemed to stall in his chest before fluttering back to life too rapidly, like a sleeper woken mid-dream, and his breath came in shallow gasps. Sweat slicked his palms, but when he clenched his fists, his fingers felt icy against them, as if he were a templar in the throes of lyrium withdrawal. He wished he hadn’t left his sword back at the mansion – it would have drawn unwanted attention, but he needed the comfort of its weight against his back, the knowledge that he need only reach over his shoulder to grasp its pommel. The last time he had been in this place, he had only remembered being a slave, but now he remembered _becoming_ a slave, the fear and apprehension of not knowing if you’d be sold to a relatively kind master or to someone like Danarius to be leashed and displayed as an exotic animal during the day and used as a plaything at night. 

As he leaned against the cold stone of a column, trying to shrug off the sharp talons of fear sinking into his spine, Fenris thought of the mages sent to the Kirkwall Circle, if they felt the same apprehension as a slave being sold to a new master. Did the mages wonder if their templar keepers would be humane or if their bodies would be used by them for sport or sex or worse? Had _Karl_ felt that trepidation, going from the Ferelden Circle – which Anders had made to sound fairly liberal as long as one wasn’t constantly trying to escape it – to this stone island steeped in the blood of slaves, where writing a letter to a friend was considered a crime? Had he waited those long months for Anders to find him or had he fought against his captors as best he could until his struggles were cut off by the Rite of Tranquility? 

Daring discovery, Fenris let his markings flare, the familiar burn of them somehow soothing, the calm he often felt in the midst of a fight seeming to coat him like a thick enamel. His breathing began to even out, and, letting the light go out of the lyrium, he stepped out of the cover of the columns and headed toward the gate that Anders had told him would lead to the First Enchanter’s office. He kept his head down to avoid notice, but also to block out the sight of the many Tranquil in the courtyard with their flat stares and sun-branded foreheads, selling their wares to earn coin for the Circle. They didn’t unnerve him the way they seemed to unsettle Anders – though Fenris understood _why_ the mage avoided them, not wanting the reminder both of Karl and his own possible fate if he should fall into the templars’ hands. For Fenris, the Tranquil brought to mind slaves who had given in, who had had their spirits broken to the point that they had no identity, no desires of their own. He’d nearly been one of them himself. But now when he saw the expressionless eyes of a Tranquil, dull as unpolished silver, or heard the uninflected tone of their voices, all he could imagine was the warmth of Anders’s eyes cooled to that tepidity, the expressive music of his tenor voice flattening into one monotonous note, and his stomach would twist within him, nausea curling his tongue. 

Anders had said that more Tranquil had been showing up in the Gallows Courtyard, but Fenris hadn’t thought anything of it other than to tell him not to go to the Gallows, even though Anders had insisted that it wasn’t just because he was sensitive to it. He’d still assumed Anders was exaggerating; Justice wasn’t prone to such things, but that was one area in which Justice’s influence on Anders seemed patchy at best. But as Fenris crossed the courtyard, he noticed more stalls than before, manned by Tranquil, and more of them traversed the stone forecourt at their measured pace. When Fenris looked at them, he could see an odd yet familiar hesitance to their movements. Their faces were unmarked apart from the sunburst brands on their foreheads, but he would have bet his last sovereign (which was currently nestled among the feathers in his belt pouch) that their bodies were striped with bruises beneath their robes. How many times had Hadriana applied the lash with such care that all the marks she left would be covered by his clothing? He’d almost been relieved when Danarius had decided to make him wear little but gilded chains, but then Hadriana had simply beaten him with impunity and healed him afterward. 

He headed toward the wicket gate beside a heavy portcullis. It rattled when he tugged on it but did not open. _Of course it would be locked, fool_ , he thought. _What would a prison be with unlocked doors?_ Glancing through an opening in the portcullis, he wondered why a prison would not have solid doors. Most likely so the mages could know exactly what they were barred from – smell the brisk, briny odor of the harbor, see the cloud-spotted sunsets that flamed over Kirkwall. Fenris had passed a few mages in the courtyard, but they always seemed to be in a hurry, heads down, templars on their heels, clearly not out for a stroll and some fresh air. 

“You there, elf! What is your business here?” a voice called from behind him, and Fenris could hear the telltale clanking of the heavy, cumbersome plate the templars wore. _Maker’s arse_ , he thought as he turned, longing once again for the weight of his sword across his back. 

He recognized the templar by sight, a young man with golden eyes that would almost have been the color of Anders’s if the red rings left by lyrium ingestion hadn’t brightened the green flecks in them. The fellow had been standing in the courtyard, staring at the sky and rubbing his chin as if pondering some deep philosophical question, though he’d probably just been trying to figure out the fastest way to take a piss while wearing plate armor. Fenris had seen him at the Blooming Rose before as well, earnestly speaking to Madam Lusine, the tips of his ears turning bright red any time one of the “companions” smiled at him. 

“I am here to speak to the First Enchanter,” Fenris said, refusing to give the templar any kind of title. He and Anders should have come up with a better story, for now something that too closely resembled the truth rose up to his lips. “My sister is coming to live in the city, and she is a mage. I am here to, uh, make arrangements for her.” 

The templar gave him a skeptical frown, and for a moment, Fenris thought he saw the man’s nostrils twitching. _Could_ he smell the lyrium in his skin? “I see,” the man said finally. “Where do you and your sister come from, Serah Elf?” 

“Seheron,” Fenris replied, again hewing too narrowly to the truth for his own liking. 

“Well, you did right by coming here… though perhaps this is an issue for the templars rather than the First Enchanter,” the templar said, a thoughtful frown creasing his brow. “Seheron may be in the grip of the Imperium, but Kirkwall certainly is not.” Fenris couldn’t help but glance over the man’s shoulder at the slave statues hanging in the courtyard. “On the other hand, the First Enchanter is far less busy than the Knight-Commander, so I will take you to him. Follow me.” 

The templar unlocked the wicket gate and led Fenris through it and up a flight of white stone steps. The interior of the Gallows was no more hospitable than the exterior – all rigid, cold stone and wickedly pointed iron bars. This part of the fortress seemed to be frequented only by templars, though Fenris thought he glimpsed a few Tranquil in the corridors that branched off the main entry hall. 

“Are mages permitted to use magic in here?” he asked suddenly, not sure where the question had come from or why he’d asked it. Anders had told him enough of his time at the Ferelden Circle for Fenris to know the answer already. His voice bounced off the hard surfaces of the hall, harsh and raucous as the squawks of the gulls over the harbor, incongruous in this quiet, sepulchral place. 

“Yes, of course, though not in this specific part of the Gallows, and only under the supervision of templars – and the apprentices only under the supervision of senior mages and templars. Outside of the Gallows, they are allowed to heal with magic, if they are trained in that specialty, and they occasionally perform for visiting nobility at the Keep.” 

Fenris tugged the hood of his cloak further over his face, trying to hide the sneer he felt pulling at his lip. He had no love for mages – except _one_ , he told himself – but the idea of people made to perform like trained animals brought back too easily his days as Danarius’s pet, forced to use his markings on cue to impress his master’s guests. 

The templar went on, “Here in the Gallows, magic is only done in designated areas, the better to contain the danger should anything… unfortunate happen.” Fenris thought he heard a slight tremor quiver through the man’s voice, but when the templar spoke again, it was back to its usual stilted plumminess. “You must not be frightened, Serah,” he said, giving Fenris what the fellow likely thought was a reassuring smile, but the stiffness of it made it seem somehow smug to Fenris’s eyes. Fenris bowed his head to hide the roll of his eyes and his deepening sneer. “We are perfectly safe here. There have been… troubles at other circles, it is true, but in Kirkwall, under the Knight-Commander’s careful guidance, things are done properly.” 

“What happens if a mage uses magic without permission?” Fenris asked, glancing at the templar from under the edge of his hood. All he saw was his own reflection in the man’s impeccable armor – he probably stayed up nights buffing it to a perfect shine while reciting the Chant – and looked away quickly. He did not need any confirmation of what Anders had told him; of course he believed the mage, but…. 

“They are Silenced,” the templar replied. “But do not worry – being Silenced does not harm a mage; it merely drains their mana, leaving them unable to tap into the Fade and cast spells. Then they are punished as is deemed fit. Though it can be difficult for those who have been apostates, your sister will learn quickly, I am sure.” Again a quick flash of the attempt at a reassuring smile – the man seemed to have a stick up his arse the size of Fenris’s sword. 

Fenris stumbled over his own feet at the mention of Varania or, rather, his invented sister – Varania may have seemed cowed by Danarius, but now he could remember how bossy she’d been when they were children, always questioning their mother’s orders. “Yes, she will, of course,” he muttered. He wanted to ask what would become of her if she didn’t, but he already knew the answer – he’d already _seen_ the answer, in the many-rayed sun branded on Karl’s forehead, in the shiny, puckered scars crisscrossing Anders’s back, in the dance of the lamp’s flame left burning through the night so Anders could sleep. 

The templar led him down a short hall to an open door, walking through it without a knock. “First Enchanter Orsino? There is…” he glanced over his shoulder at Fenris with frown, as if trying to decide on a title, “…someone here to speak with you. His sister will be joining the Circle soon, and he wants to make arrangements for her.” Not waiting for a response, he gestured for Fenris to enter the room, and Fenris edged past him. 

Inside the cramped office, the floor hatchmarked by the sunlight coming through the barred window, was a large desk that dwarfed the slight elf behind it. The First Enchanter looked up from his papers when Fenris walked in, two crescents of worry incised between his brows. The lines didn’t smooth at all – he had an air of being at once perpetually harried and deeply sorrowful, a combination that reminded Fenris of Anders in his bleaker moments, when he couldn’t even bring himself to make some ridiculous pun or immature sexual innuendo. 

Orsino laid his quill down and folded his hands on the desk. “Yes, thank you, Knight-Captain. I’m sure my letter to the Grand Enchanter can wait until the next ship to Cumberland.” 

His tone – insolent to Fenris’s ears, honed by years of checking his own speech for anything that could be considered impertinent – didn’t seem to faze the Knight-Captain, who merely said, “Very good” with a stiff nod and headed back toward the entry hall, leaving Fenris and the First Enchanter to stare at one another in silence. 

They listened to the heavy thud of his footsteps recede until they could no longer be heard, and then Orsino asked, “Your sister is an apostate, and she is coming to Kirkwall?” 

“I… uh…” Fenris began, tempted to just tear Anders’s letter from his belt pouch and toss it onto Orsino’s desk. But the strident voice ringing through the hall from the office across the way – Knight-Commander Meredith’s, he assumed – made him reassess the importance of maintaining the appearance of real business with the First Enchanter. If they could hear her, surely she could hear _them_ , if she did not have spies specifically monitoring Orsino’s visits. “Yes.” 

“You should write to her and tell her to stay where she is,” the First Enchanter said. For a moment, Fenris thought Orsino was going to go back to writing his letter and dismiss him, so he fumbled in his belt pouch for the note from Anders and carefully slid it across the First Enchanter’s desk. Blood from the seagull feathers made a livid streak across the parchment, and Orsino raised a questioning eyebrow at it as he picked up the letter. 

“She may already be on her way,” Fenris murmured, casting about for something else to ask to keep up the ruse. “She is coming from Seheron.” 

Orsino was bowed over the letter, the creases on his forehead deepening as he furrowed his brow, and he seemed too engrossed in whatever Anders had written to reply. But then, in a musing, distracted voice, he said, “If the Imperium is in control of the island, it will be worse for her here. If the Qunari have taken it over…” He sighed. “…Kirkwall may be a _slight_ improvement.” Another outburst rang out from across the hall – Fenris caught the words “blood magic” – and the First Enchanter slowly closed his eyes, exhaling with a shudder. “ _Very_ slight. You would have done better to try to hide her in the Alienage. Or take her back to the Imperium.” He must have noticed the sharp glance that Fenris gave him, because he said, “I have not been so sequestered from the world that I cannot recognize a Tevinter accent.” 

“That is… not possible,” Fenris said through his clenched teeth. He had knotted his hands into fists at the first mention of the Imperium, and he stared down at them, willing them to loosen. “Is it really so bad in the Circle?” 

The First Enchanter put down the letter and fixed Fenris with a steady stare. “Yes.” The word hung in the air between them like a crystal dangling from a chandelier, hard and brittle. Fenris’s skin crawled from the intensity of the look, the hopelessness in the mage’s eyes, as if the man had watched his own death warrant being signed. Perhaps, by being born a mage outside of the Imperium, he had. Fenris broke the stare first, turning his head to fake a cough into his fist, and that gesture seemed to free Orsino’s tongue. He took paper and another well of ink from his desk and began to draft what Fenris assumed was a response to Anders, all the while speaking under his breath, so low that Fenris had to lean toward him to catch any of the words over the scratching of his quill. 

“When the Viscount fell ill, I hoped there might be a chance for change. A younger, more free-thinking Viscount might intercede with the Grand Cleric on our behalf, but now that Saemus has fallen in with the Qunari, that is impossible.” He tossed sand onto the page to dry the ink, brushed it away, and began to fold the paper. Fenris resisted the urge to crane his neck to see what the First Enchanter had written, though he doubted his reading skills were equal to the task, especially upside-down. 

Orsino reached up to hand him the letter, a fixed smile on his narrow face. “If the Qunari gain any kind of influence in Kirkwall, we will have to rely on the templars to protect us. It is like throwing yourself on the mercy of a high dragon to protect yourself from a wyvern.” 

Frowning, Fenris tried to take the letter, but the First Enchanter held fast to it. “When your sister’s ship arrives, meet it at the docks and tell her not to disembark, if you care for her safety at all. Or even for your own. This is no life.” With that, he let go of the paper, and Fenris quickly shoved it back into his belt pouch, hoping that the mage couldn’t see the goosebumps prickling his arm. 

“I thank you for your advice, First Enchanter,” he said, louder for the benefit of the occupant of the office across the hall, and gave a quick, formal bow. 

“I wish I could be of more assistance,” Orsino said with a sigh, giving a dismissive flick of his hand. Fenris caught himself short of flinching away from the gesture, as if the mage had hurled a fireball at him. “To both of you.” 

As Fenris hurried back toward the wicket gate, he couldn’t help but wonder if Orsino had been referring to him and his sister, or to him and Anders.


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up a bit early! Also, it's quite long because there wasn't a good place to break it. Thanks for reading!

“This is it?” Anders turned the sheet of parchment over – the back was blank, except for a few smears of what looked like dried blood. He looked up at Fenris, who was sitting on the window seat, his slender limbs silhouetted by the gold of the setting sun. Anders had climbed to the highest part of the mansion, trying to get a view of the harbor, as if he could tell from that distance which of the tiny boats – which looked no bigger than specks of tea leaves in the cup of the harbor – Fenris was on, and that was where the elf had found him and proffered the folded page with an almost sheepish air. “ _This_ is what he gave you?”

“I could hardly have written it myself,” Fenris replied, his voice as dry as a summer noon in the Anderfels. 

Anders read the neat script on the note out loud, not bothering to keep the incredulity and frustration out of his voice. “‘The son has unsympathetic friends. Our jailer may be our protector.’ What kind of fourth-rate spymaster nonsense is that? If Orsino is going to write in riddles, they could at least be _good_ riddles. Or a bawdy limerick. ‘There once was a man called Saemus/Who liked Qunari cock in his anus’, maybe?” 

That, at least, earned a half-amused, half-disgusted snort from Fenris. “The First Enchanter did mention that, were the Qunari to exert influence over the new Viscount, the templars would at least be a line of defense for the mages,” he said. He sounded hesitant, each word drawn out as painstakingly as a splinter being removed with a needle. 

“But this… this is madness. To do _nothing_? To wait… for what?” Anders crumpled the note in his fist and hurled it toward the dust-caked, cobweb-filled fireplace. “The Viscount is still alive. He could still recover. And then we’d be back where we started with Dumar’s balls in the Knight-Commander’s pocket and her boot on our throats.” He slumped down onto the window seat beside Fenris and scrubbed his hands over his face. “How could the Qunari be any worse? Worse than Ser Alrik? Worse than Meredith herself?” 

Fenris shifted uncomfortably at his side, clearing his throat as if about to speak but then saying nothing. He’d seemed uneasy since his return from the Gallows, strapping his gauntlets on even before he’d found Anders and given him Orsino’s letter, though they were alone in the mansion. Anders could still feel that cold brush of steel on his fingertips as Fenris handed him the note, a far sharper warning than Orsino’s nonsense. 

The sun dipped behind the towers of Hightown, submerging the room in a blue gloom, but neither of them made a move to go downstairs to Fenris’s slightly more-lived-in room. Instead they sat in silence, Anders with his hands clasped over his mouth like one of the slave drawings in the Darktown sewers, Fenris clenching and unclenching his fists, the joints of his gauntlets ticking. The sound of his own breath seemed too loud to Anders’s ears in that silence, hitting his fingers and rebounding back at him. He remembered winter in the dungeon at Kinloch Hold, when the stone walls had been so cold that his breath had condensed on them as he’d listened to it rasp from his own throat and thought, “I am still breathing. I am still alive,” over and over again until he was almost convinced of it. 

The words came back to him now as he listened to his breath, a louder melody over the harmony of Fenris’s, “I am still breathing. I am still alive. While I am alive, there is still hope.” Perhaps he’d have to amend that last bit – the intervening years, especially those in Kirkwall, had taught him that hope was a foolish thing for a mage to cling to. 

“No. No, it’s impossible,” Anders said finally, mostly to himself, since apparently Knight-Commander Meowedith had torn Fenris’s tongue from his mouth when Anders wasn’t looking. “Besides, if she suspected the Qunari would use Saemus as a puppet, Meredith would request the Right of the Annulment before the crown was even on his head.” 

Fenris’s voice rasped with disuse, like a steel blade being dragged across a whetstone. “Mage… do you not know how mages are treated under the Qun?” 

Anders dropped his hands from his face and turned to look at him. Fenris’s face was a blur in the twilit dimness of the room, given vague form only by the pinpoints of golden light in his eyes, the pale glister of his hair, and the two gleaming white curves of lyrium on his chin. “Could it be worse than being taken from your family as a child and forced to live locked in a tower, under constant surveillance and near-constant threat of being made Tranquil? Worse than being killed by your captors because you’ve become… inconvenient?” 

“Perhaps it is better than being killed, though I’m sure _you_ would wish yourself dead if you had to live under the Qun,” Fenris said slowly. He sounded choked, the words being forced through a tight, unwilling throat. Anders could hear a sneer in his voice, that grimace of disgust and anger that bordered on a snarl, could picture the fullness of his upper lip pulled back from his teeth. What could make Fenris _that_ furious, he wondered, on behalf of mages, of all things? 

“Why?” he made himself ask, his voice thin, like the last upward tendril of smoke from an extinguished candle flame. 

The specks of light swung away, and then he could see Fenris’s profile picked out against the white stone of the window frame behind him. Before he could stop himself, Anders reached out into the darkness between them, seeking the warmth of bare skin but finding only the chill of steel. 

“You say that mages are prisoners – and after being inside the Gallows, I do not entirely disagree,” Fenris said. “But Saarebas have even less freedom than that. They are prisoners in their own bodies, not permitted to speak or see or move freely or ever, _ever_ be alone.” The words came in a rush now, as if getting them out quickly would somehow lessen their impact. “The Qunari keep them collared and chained, and those collars prevent them from casting spells – it would be like wearing a templar around your neck, constantly Silencing you.” Anders heard the faint, damp swipe of Fenris’s tongue over his lips, his hard swallow. “I used to wish Danarius had been fitted with one of those collars,” he murmured, bowing his head. 

Nausea churned in Anders’s gut, stronger than any elfroot brew could calm. Sweat pricked along his hairline, and turning to face Fenris made more beads of it trickle down his spine. “I—I… that is… the Circle mages would be my first priority, but if I could somehow free the Qunari mages, I would….” Justice stirred in the back of his mind, and Anders welcomed him – he had felt himself on the point of falling back into his old habits of not caring about things that didn’t affect him, though he doubted anything could be done for the Qunari mages even if he _could_ free them. The Qunari had strange ideas about purpose and honor and other notions that had seemed unimportant to him before he’d met Justice. 

Fenris shook his head with a dry, unamused laugh that sounded almost incredulous – though Anders couldn’t tell if he was shocked by Anders’s arrogance or his ignorance. “You don’t understand, mage. They have keepers, and if they are separated from those keepers, however briefly, they are killed. Or they commit suicide. They have no concept of freedom – there is no place for them under the Qun if they are free.” 

“But… what would the Qunari do with non-Qunari mages?” Anders asked. “What did they make of the magisters in the Imperium?” 

“The Qunari and the Imperium are at war – of course, they would have killed any Tevinter mages they could.” Anders saw a faint glint of white as Fenris bit his lower lip in thought. “They might consider any mage who grew up without the strict supervision of a keeper – one who was able to work magic without a specific order to do so, one who was able to communicate – to be a tainted thing. Irrevocably tainted. They – and anyone they came into contact with – would be killed. Perhaps, for a human or elvhen mage, they would give them _qamek_ rather than killing them outright.” 

Anders opened his mouth to ask the obvious question – _What in the name of Andraste’s flaming knickers is_ qamek? – but Fenris spoke again before he could get the words out. “From what I understand, it is like being made Tranquil without the brand.” He swallowed hard a few times, as if trying to work moisture back into his mouth, but his voice still came out thick and clagged. “Everything that was you would be gone, and you would be a mindless servant of the Qun.” The tiny wedges of light in Fenris’s eyes swung back up to Anders’s face, darting back and forth minutely as if he were trying to take in every bit of Anders’s features. “That is what Orsino meant in his message, and… I agree with him.” 

Anders felt as if he were standing in the Chantry belfry when the great bells were tolling – a deafening clamor thundered in his head, reverberating through his body, his very bones seeming to vibrate. He jumped to his feet and began to pace in spite of the complaints of the rotting floorboards beneath his feet, just for something to do, just to escape from the all-too-alluring warmth and closeness of Fenris, just so he could feel as if he were trampling Fenris’s words beneath his boots. 

“So what do we do?” he asked, pinching his brow between his thumb and forefinger. “Nothing? We wait and see _if_ Dumar dies and _if_ Saemus gives the Qunari more standing in the city, and meanwhile the templars give Harrowed mages the brand for minor infractions?” He lit the wall-lamps with a flick of his hand, enjoying the brief stab of petty satisfaction he got from Fenris flinching at the sudden light, at the scrape of magic against his lyrium brands. 

The lamplight – flickering in the many drafts – threw trembling, fitful shadows across Fenris’s face, making him seem to shimmer like a heat mirage; Anders wanted to reach out and touch him, reaffirm his solidity, but for a moment, he was certain that his fingertips would pass right through him. A bead of light swam like a golden fish through the mossy green of the elf’s illuminated eye as he raised his gaze to Anders – its twin sliced through the cloak of shadow on the other side of his face. 

“We could leave Kirkwall,” he said, his voice almost the softness and pitch of Justice when he rumbled in the back of Anders’s head, but Anders knew Justice would never make such a suggestion any more than he would allow Anders to accept this one from Fenris. 

_Have you labored all these years to abandon your purpose now?_ Justice asked, his words rolling over Fenris’s in a wave. Anders felt tumbled by them, the fleeting triumph of Fenris saying “we” washed away by the deluge of Justice. _Our work is needed now more than ever. Would you fail those who are the most vulnerable?_

“I can’t.” It was a weak wisp of a word, a frayed thread on the point of snapping, tugged from his lips. “You know I can’t. You know _why_ I can’t.” He made himself look away from Fenris – he turned his gaze toward the fireplace where he had thrown Orsino’s note, and with a crackle, the parchment blossomed into flame and immediately collapsed in a shower of ash. “It will be the same wherever we go. It’s never going to stop. Not ever.” He swallowed, wishing he could gulp down the words that were poised on his tongue but knowing he could not. “The only place I could go in safety is the one place I would never ask you to return to.” 

“ _Vishante kaffas_!” Fenris snarled, and a gob of saliva spattered the dusty floorboards next to the toe of Anders’s boot. “Disguising your self-righteousness as magnanimity as always. Since when have you cared about running? You ran from the Circle – seven bloody times! – straight to the Grey Wardens. And then you ran from the Wardens to Kirkwall. It’s practically a habit for you.” 

“It _was_ a habit for me,” Anders said. “I am no longer that person. You never knew that person.” 

“Perhaps you would have been better off if you’d run into some Qunari on one of your escapes,” Fenris muttered. Shadows flooded the little crescents and ridges made by the furrow of his brow, the disgusted wrinkle of his nose. “They would have sewn your idiot mouth shut and you never would have made that deal with your blighted demon.” 

“He’s not a demon!” Anders snapped, more out of habit than anything else. He knew Fenris only used the word to anger him, to distract him from the actual argument at hand – it was something he would have done himself, the shunting of blame onto the other whether it was relevant or not, throwing it onto them like a heavy cloak in summer. “And you would know all about running, wouldn’t you? After all, you ran from your family straight to Danarius, from Danarius to the Fog Warriors, and then from the corpses of the Fog Warriors to Kirkwall—” 

Fenris leapt up from the window seat so quickly that Anders didn’t even see him move before the elf’s gauntleted fist smashed into his jaw. And then he was flat on his back, tiny whirlwinds of dust spiraling up around him from the impact of his fall, pain burning through his jaw and cheek. Blood welled up in the furrows gouged by Fenris’s fingerguards and streamed down his cheek and onto the floor, warm as tears, dampening his hair and the collar of his coat. The taste of it filled his mouth, syrupy and ferrous, a poor sauce for the bitterness that already coated his tongue. He tried to push himself up, but the room was whirling around him, and he sank back onto his elbows, dimly aware of Fenris pacing in semicircles behind him, like a cat waiting to see its prey twitch before giving it another boxing with its paws. _You knew he was an animal_ , a voice scolded him, not Justice’s, but perhaps a former iteration of himself, one who had seen Fenris as a means to an end. One who had had a sense of self-preservation. It must have been a very short-lived version of himself. 

He knew he was being unfair – to believe that of Fenris was to ignore everything he’d learned about him since they’d met, everything they’d done together, everything they’d survived. And that was what Fenris was, he realized – a survivor. He’d been a survivor once himself, though of a different kind, the cowardly kind, Nathaniel probably would have said. The difference was that Fenris knew his mind wouldn’t survive without his body and so tried to preserve the body, running when the odds were too great, whereas Anders – no doubt because of the ever-present threat of Tranquility – knew his body wouldn’t survive without his mind, his dreams, his connection to the Fade. 

“Why am I even here, if you think so little of me, Fenris?” he asked, addressing the musty air in front of his face. He was unwilling to turn and look at the elf, not wanting to deal with the inevitable lurch of the room when he moved his head and the equally inevitable lurch of his heart when he saw the contempt scrawled across Fenris’s face. Contempt and regret and disgust. Just as he’d seen on his father’s face all those years ago. Just as he’d seen on Nathaniel’s face when he’d blurted out that he loved him. 

“Whatever Justice and I have become, it’s what I’ve been the whole time you’ve known me.” He dabbed at the blood rolling down his cheek with his cuff, aiming for one of the lengths of bandage wrapped around his forearm but smearing the worn green fabric of the coat instead. The gesture made the cuts gape open wider, sending another gout of blood sliding over his jaw and down his neck, and when he swallowed, his mouth and throat were thick with it. 

“Heal yourself,” was Fenris’s only reply, and Anders laughed, though it made the cuts on his face twinge, and shook his head, spitting a mouthful of treacle-thick blood and saliva onto the floorboards. 

“Why don’t you finish hitting me, and then I can heal everything all at once?” 

The soft tattoo of Fenris’s feet paused, and for a moment, Anders thought he sensed the warmth of the elf’s palm radiating onto the crown of his head, as if Fenris’s hand were hovering just inches above him. Going for the brain rather than the heart would be more effective at least, he thought, if far less dramatic, and he supposed there was some kind of satisfying symmetry to dying the same way Karl had, with Fenris’s spiked fingerguard stirring his brains to slurry. He tried to keep himself from sitting up straighter, from craning up into that warmth as if he were tied to Fenris’s wrist, and he knew it wasn’t death he sought anymore but Fenris. 

The elf’s footsteps moved away once more, and with a sigh, Anders levered himself to his feet, leaning heavily on the window seat and trying not to stagger when the room careened around him. 

“What are you doing?” Fenris asked. 

“Leaving,” Anders replied. “Going back to the clinic. The templars have probably gotten tired of guarding broken crates and shattered potion bottles by now.” He turned, meaning to brush past Fenris without really looking at him, knowing that one glimpse of the elf’s face would melt his resolve like spun sugar in the rain. 

“No, I will not allow it!” Fenris said, the words forced through tightly gritted teeth. He grabbed Anders’s shoulders, gauntlets digging into the flesh of his upper arms, and shoved him away from the door. “You’re willing to die to save those who are twice-doomed? It is utter foolishness, even for you!” 

Anders stumbled back a few steps, catching himself on a listing banquet table chewed to lace by woodworms. “Very optimistic of you to think you can stop me,” he said, keeping his voice soft, as if Justice were a restless sleeper he was trying to avoid waking. “Really, it’s adorable.” 

He raised his hands, intending to cast a simple force magic spell, just to push Fenris out of the way long enough for him to bolt from the room. Before he could fully tap into the Fade, though, Fenris barreled into him, knocking him onto his back on the tabletop, crushing the breath from his lungs. The elf pinned his arms to the wood, pressing his blade-sharp fingerguards against Anders’s wrists, just short of drawing blood. The magic winked out of his fingertips, but into the void it left, Justice surged, seeming to expand within him, crushing everything that was Anders to the periphery. He clung to control by his fingertips – how could he watch Justice eviscerate Fenris as a passenger in his own head? He’d almost been a spectator to himself murdering children, screaming in his own mind as he watched Justice cast the spell to immolate them all, and had only been saved from that fate by Fenris’s intervention. 

But now there was no one to plunge a fist into his gut if Justice decided the elf was too much of a threat, unless Fenris himself sensed the danger. Anders squirmed beneath Fenris, trying to heave his weight off of him even as the steel of the elf’s gauntlets flayed the skin off his wrists, just wanting Fenris as far away as possible. 

“Maker’s arse, Fenris, let me go!” he cried, distantly impressed that he’d been able to get the words out at all, until he heard the roar of Justice in them, like the crash of a waterfall from far upstream. 

Fenris must have heard it too, because he tightened his grip on Anders’s wrists and rested more of his weight on him, his hips pushing down on Anders’s, pinning him to the tabletop. “No,” he shouted, “I won’t let you put him in danger, demon!” 

Blue light flashed over Fenris’s grimacing face. For a confused moment, Anders thought that he’d activated his lyrium markings to subdue Justice as he’d done before, but then he realized that he was seeing light from his own eyes bathing the elf’s face, shining on the sweat on his forehead, glinting off his bared teeth. 

_No! Justice, stop! He’s trying to protect us_ — The thought shattered as Fenris’s gauntlets tightened around his wrists again, the faint clink of the metal and the burn of the cuts they opened bringing back time-faded memories of chains… heavy chains that tethered him to a cold, mossy stone wall, that gouged into his flesh, leaving wounds he wasn’t allowed to heal. 

“ _I WILL NEVER BE TAKEN AGAIN!_ ” The bellow of Justice echoed through the mostly empty room, dislodging showers of plaster and dust from the rotting ceiling. Anders felt his body arching upward, throwing Fenris off of him, and then saw his freed arms rising, fists glowing with the force magic spell he’d tried to cast earlier. Fenris skittered across the floor like a dead leaf blown by the winter wind and crashed into the opposite wall. He lay there in a heap, still but for his fingers that flexed slowly as if trying to moor himself to the floorboards by the claws of his gauntlets. 

_Go_ , Anders pleaded with Justice. _We can leave now. Just go_. But the spirit was carrying their shared body toward Fenris, the dim room seething now with the blue glow of the Fade seeping through the cracks in his skin. 

Fenris dragged himself to his feet, a streak of blood marring one cheek, mirroring the slashes on Anders’s face. Light flooded into his markings, and the room was suddenly bright as daybreak as the brilliance of the lyrium was added to the glare of the Fade radiating from Justice. 

The sound washed over him first, in gradually intensifying waves. _This must be the lyrium song that Justice is always muttering about_ , Anders thought. It had always been muffled before, washed-out and secondhand, as if being described rather than heard, more of a feeling than an actual noise. Now the song began as the faintest tinkling, like icicles touched by the warmth of the morning sun, then grew into the shimmering chime of the tide coming in on a shingle beach. As Fenris came toward him, wicked gauntlets at the ready, the sound rose still further, enveloping Anders, to the clarion, shivering peal of a nail flicked against the rim of a crystal goblet. He could feel Justice relax into it like a cat having its chin scratched, and he pushed against the spirit’s control – usually when mollified and assured that Anders was under no threat, Justice relinquished command of their body back to him – but still he was trapped, able to see Fenris advancing on him but not able to stop him or to tell him that Justice had stood down. 

The tips of Fenris’s fingerguards brushed the front of Anders’s coat, and he waited for them to pierce his flesh, slice through his ribcage, while the lyrium song peaked in a clangor of bells, as if every one in all of Hightown were tolling at once, thundering, violent, yet alluring. It sounded like home. And under the cool, quivering clamor of the Fade that Justice heard, Anders could hear the calls of birds in the woods near his family’s farm, the whistle of the wind through the fields, his mother’s voice singing a lullaby. He watched as his own hands rose and grasped Fenris’s wrist. Did Justice mean to stop Fenris from tearing out their shared heart or had Anders retained enough control that he was encouraging it, trying to draw the elf’s clawed hand into himself? He could feel the coldness of the steel beneath his fingertips, the scratch of the metal against his palms, but it was more as if he were remembering the sensations than actually experiencing them. Even Fenris’s flinch when Anders’s hands wrapped around his wrist seemed sluggish and dreamlike, a figment of the Fade rather than reality, as if the song of the lyrium had shredded the tenuous threads of the Veil itself. 

Mired in the slow unreality like a fly caught in honey, Anders watched Fenris’s palm draw closer to his face, a map of glowing lyrium, reeled toward him by arms that he could not govern. The points of Fenris’s fingerguards brushed his eyelashes, sickeningly close to his eyeballs by Anders’s standards, but Justice didn’t seem to mind. And then his lips were pressing against the palm of Fenris’s hand, the calluses from long hours of swordplay hard and rough beneath them, the lyrium thrumming like a pulse, its clean scent filling his nostrils. _If the feeling of your hair standing up on the back of your neck had an odor, it would be lyrium_ , Anders thought, though that’s how he had always felt around Fenris, first from apprehension, then from attraction so strong it seemed as if his body were always seeking the elf… but even then sometimes from apprehension. 

Fenris’s gasp at the brush of Anders’s mouth was faint even in the near-silence of the room, a susurration like a silk robe sliding off bare skin, drowned out by the throbbing melody of the lyrium. Anders felt his tongue slip from between his lips and dart along the markings on Fenris’s palm, lapping at it as if he were a kitten and Fenris were holding cream cupped in his hand. Something like hunger – that had the same gnawing emptiness as hunger but was tinged with a longing, not for food but for home, for familiarity, for belonging – filled him, the swelling emotion still feeling somehow borrowed, even though he wanted all of those things for himself. He tried to follow each path, even though, at that moment, he knew they would all lead to Fenris, to the lyrium embedded in his skin, and the Fade that seeped through the markings when they were alight. 

Blood and heat pooled his groin, his cock stiffening, his heartbeat a rapid patter, and yet he felt as if his body were acting at someone else’s behest, as if someone else had cast the spell but the magic had appeared in his hands. That he would have reacted the same way to touching Fenris was beside the point – these responses, though familiar and involuntary, didn’t seem to belong to him. They were Justice’s, Justice who had retreated in embarrassed, affronted, confused silence at a kiss from Fenris, who berated Anders for letting the elf distract them from their work. But could he begrudge the spirit some pleasure, some happiness, however unnaturally he might have come by them? 

Somehow, he had unfastened Fenris’s gauntlet and let it fall to the floor – the elf’s index finger was in his mouth, held there by hands that caressed up and down Fenris’s forearm, as if his markings were harp strings to be strummed. For a moment, the lyrium song _did_ sound like a harp, liquid, flowing, full and sweet. Anders tried to read Fenris’s face from his perch as a passenger in his own body – what must he be thinking? He wasn’t fighting against Justice’s attentions. If anything, he looked drugged, as if he had been dosed with Blood Lotus, his eyes unfocused, pupils dilated until only a tendril-thin ring of green showed, all the anger smoothed out of his face. 

Justice let Fenris’s finger slide from Anders’s mouth, leaving the taste of lyrium, salt air, and something at once sour and bitter, like the pith of an orange, lingering on his tongue. Fenris’s wrist was still grasped loosely in his fingers, and he could feel the tidal flush of blood through the veins there, each pulse seeming to strengthen the lyrium’s song. 

“This world is so full of beauty,” Anders heard Justice say in a voice as soft as his voice could get, a distant avalanche that left a startled hush in the air after it, “and yet I have overlooked your beauty, Fenris.” 

That made the all-too-familiar sneer tug at Fenris’s upper lip. “You cannot fool me, demon, the way you fooled Anders. I know what your kind do, and I know that there is always a price for succumbing to your temptation.” But in spite of the venom in his voice, he didn’t pull away when Justice kissed the inside of his wrist, just where the river of lyrium branched into an estuary of smaller streams over his palm and fingers. 

Anders had learned how to make quick work of the intricate fastenings of Fenris’s armor – and the frankly unnecessarily complex straps of his tunic – but under Justice’s control, his hands were clumsy, laboriously baring Fenris’s skin with its gleaming blue tracery of lyrium. All the while, Anders could feel that sharp hunger squirming restlessly in his belly and marveled that Justice was managing to keep his hands as steady as he was. 

“I am no demon,” Justice said as he pulled Fenris’s breastplate free of his chest and dropped it to the floor. “Nor do I intend to be a temptation. It is you who have tempted me…” Even through the strange sense of being wrapped in cotton wool, Anders could hear Fenris’s gasp as Justice kissed the scrolls of lyrium that curled over his clavicle and feel the elf’s throat churn beneath his lips with each uneasy swallow. “…and Anders as well, from our shared purpose, if through no fault of your own.” 

“You are no better than my former master, demon,” Fenris muttered, and his jaw as Anders’s tongue darted over it was tightly knotted. “You want me only for the lyrium in my skin.” 

“It sings to me,” Justice admitted, “but it belongs to you alone. If you wish me to stop, I will desist.” Justice raised his head, and in Fenris’s wide eyes, Anders could see his own face, made alien by the swirling, light-filled eyes, the blank calm of the expression. He wondered if Fenris could detect anything of him behind the roiling glow of that stare. “What would you have of me, Fenris?” 

Fenris lowered his eyes, and Anders lost his reflection in the shadow of the elf’s dark lashes. “I want to free him from you,” he murmured. Anders could hear a slight quaver in his voice, its usual roughness made even harsher by anger, but under that, there was a thready pulse of shame and – something that Anders knew all too well – self-loathing. “I do not want him to be a slave to your will any longer.” 

If Anders had been in command of his own lungs and throat, he would have gasped out loud – “slave” was not a term Fenris used lightly. Was that truly what the elf thought he was to Justice? That he did Justice’s bidding out of fear? If anything, Anders had occasionally wondered if it were the spirit who was in bondage to _him_ rather than the other way around, a bodyguard who happened to share the same body. 

“My will is now his,” Justice replied. Anders marveled at the lack of indignation in the spirit’s words at being called a slave master, but the chime of the lyrium was a steady chorus now in his ears and his tongue was coated with its flavor, so Justice must have been feeling as pliant and biddable as a cat in a patch of catmint. “And his is mine… though I have struggled against it as much as he has struggled against mine.” 

Justice traced the branching lines of lyrium on the side of Fenris’s neck with the tip of Anders’s tongue, and Anders felt the longing within both of them simultaneously surge and recede as he heard Fenris’s breath catch in his throat, felt Fenris’s erection nudging his stomach. Anders wanted to touch him, to hold that hardness cupped in his hand, but Justice seemed intent on running his tongue over the glittering white tattoos and letting their taste linger in his mouth like a posh Hightown nob savoring an Agreggio. But Fenris, for his part, in spite of that urgent pressure seemed strangely content to submit to Justice’s attentions. 

“I wish to free Anders too,” Justice rumbled against Fenris’s throat, breath thick with the ozone odor of lyrium filling Anders’s nostrils as it bounced off the elf’s skin. The words jolted Anders – Justice had never said such a thing to him. It would have been a futile wish, of course, but to know that Justice regretted what had become of their union… _Unless he regrets it because you failed him_ , Anders thought. Perhaps Justice wished he’d found a more competent host? Somehow, walled off as he was in his own mind, he smelled the scent of burning wood, the sweet, yeasty odor of hay licked by flame – the smell of failure, as he had thought of it since that long-ago day in Ferelden when the templars had led him away from home in chains. 

Fenris tensed against him, so still that Anders thought he might be holding his breath for fear the sound of it would drown out Justice’s words. Anders’s nose nestled into the crescents of pale hair curling around Fenris’s ear as Justice kissed the lyrium beneath his jaw, and Anders could feel Fenris trembling, so minutely that it might have gone unnoticed. 

“I love him as well, I suppose,” Justice said finally. “In my own way.” 

To Anders, it seemed that the deceptively thick ice of Lake Calenhad had cracked beneath his feet and dropped him into the freezing waters below – he may not have had control of his body, but internally, he was flailing, grasping desperately toward anything solid. But even as his mind thrashed about, a tiny part of him was quiet, as still as Fenris had been a moment before, waiting for the elf’s reaction to that “as well”. 

With a sigh, Fenris bowed his head, turning it to catch Anders’s lips with his own, a quick skimming of his mouth over Anders’s. Then his still-gauntleted hand rose and cradled Anders’s chin, balancing it as if it were a fine porcelain cup on the points of his fingerguards, and he kissed Anders again, a long, deep kiss. Anders craned toward that kiss like a flower in a conservatory straining upward toward the sun. He found the same barrier, though, clear as glass but a barrier nonetheless. Justice seemed to politely but impatiently suffer through the touch of Fenris’s lips, the brush of his tongue over Anders’s – after all, the lyrium markings stopped beneath Fenris’s lower lip. 

After a moment, Justice drew away and pressed a kiss to those volutes of lyrium, and then slowly sank lower, following every tendril and dot of lyrium on the elf’s throat and chest with lips and tongue. He hesitated at the waistband of Fenris’s leggings, fingers running over the faint seams of lyrium glowing on the elf’s thighs through the spirit hide. _Unlace them_ , Anders prompted, and Justice clumsily undid Fenris’s laces and shoved the leggings down his thighs. Fenris’s cock grazed Anders’s cheekbone as it was freed from his trousers, but Justice seemed more interested in the thick veins of lyrium that scrolled over his thighs, their blue glow as brilliant as their chiming song was loud. Anders could feel his eyes widen and his jaws slacken with Justice’s awe as he ran his fingertips along the swirls of the markings – _Maker, I think my bloody mouth is watering_ , Anders thought, with a twinge of embarrassment. Fenris _was_ beautiful, and Anders had told him as much – _often_ – but knowing that he was gaping like a never-been-kissed apprentice was just humiliating. 

Worst still was the rapture with which Justice buried his face in the curve of Fenris’s thigh, gliding the tip of his tongue back and forth along the markings there as his hands clutched at the elf’s arse as if to hold him in place. And all the while, there was Fenris’s cock, hard, slick with precome that glistened blue in their combined light, going completely untouched. Anders tried to nudge Justice toward it – the spirit had seemed to enjoy the threads of lyrium arching along the underside of Fenris’s cock well enough when it had been buried in Anders. 

_For the love of Andraste’s frilly knickers, Justice, touch his cock! It’s what he wants, and it’s only fair, considering_ – the tightness in his groin might have felt distant to him, but he was still uncomfortably aware of it – _the_ enjoyment _you’re getting from him_. 

_Is that the organ you touch so much at night while you think of him?_ Justice replied, and Anders was momentarily thankful that his body was out of his control and so was most likely not blushing bloody crimson with embarrassment. 

That gratitude only deepened as Justice began giving Fenris the most inexpert sucking-off Anders had witnessed since the first time he’d tried to suck Karl’s cock – sloppy, gagging, and focused mostly on dragging his tongue over the lyrium on the underside of the elf’s prick as much as possible. Anders noticed, with a combination of relief, disappointment, and more than hint of jealousy, that Fenris didn’t appear to have any complaints, however – his head tipped back, the markings on his neck hitching upward with every moan, his hips thrusting himself gently into Anders’s mouth. His gauntleted fingers skimmed through Anders’s hair, clenching in it with a sharp tug when Justice swallowed around his cock, and then his hand settled at the back of Anders’s neck, his thumb grazing his cheekbone, the faint scratch of the spiked fingerguard soothed away by the warm brush of the pad of it. 

The verdant bitterness of Fenris’s come mingled with the burnt sweetness of the lyrium, strong enough that Anders could taste it, and he strained at the barrier between himself and his own body, resenting the pleased hum from Justice that seemed to match the song from the lyrium. All of the anger from earlier had been scoured away, replaced with anger at himself for this possessiveness – Fenris himself would have bristled at the idea that he _belonged_ to anyone anymore – and an overwhelming want, a hunger that matched that which had flared into being in Justice when Fenris had activated his markings. 

His fingers dug into the hard muscle of Fenris’s arse, as if to pull Fenris deeper into his mouth. Anders’s eyes watered and saliva ran down his chin, but it didn’t seem that Justice had a gag reflex, at least not one that could rival his greed for the taste of lyrium. Fenris moaned, a low, throaty rasp like the sound of a flame consuming its fuel, and snapped his hips forward, fucking Anders’s mouth with an abandon Anders hadn’t expected – Fenris was usually hesitant with such things, surprisingly gentle, always seeming afraid of doing the wrong thing, of displeasing Anders. If it had been him rather than Justice, Anders would have been oddly proud of Fenris. Not that Justice was discouraging it – Anders felt his fingernails sink into the flesh of Fenris’s arse, the lyrium gritty beneath them. 

Fenris let out a choked cry of pain and faltered in his rhythm, his markings flickering like a wounded firefly sending its last pulsing signal into the darkness before winking out completely. The song of the lyrium died, leaving only a faint vibrating chime in the air that felt more like the memory of a sound, a remembered ringing in the ears, than an actual noise, and with it went Justice, back to the corner of Anders’s brain that he usually occupied. Anders felt as if he had fallen into his own body from a great height, landing with a jolt – he slumped back onto his heels, letting go of Fenris’s arse and scrubbing his hand across his face to wipe away the mingled tears and saliva. 

Sensation rushed back into his body as well, almost overwhelming in its intensity – the taste of Fenris on his tongue, the almost painful welling up of pressure in his groin, the remembrance of the smoothness of Fenris’s skin on his fingertips. The thunder of blood in his temples, the pound of his heart all seemed too much, and he crumpled over, willing his breath to slow and deepen. The skin of his hands as they clutched his knees was smooth and unbroken – all that lingered of Justice’s presence were a few tiny threads of black smoke dissipating into the darkness of the room. 

Fenris staggered back a step, and the shuffling movement made Anders glance up, taking in the long curves of his thighs, the hard cock rising between them, still glistening with Anders’s spit. He rose onto his knees again, but instead of reaching for the elf, he began tearing at his own clothes, eyes never leaving Fenris’s erection. His hand strayed down to his own cock, as if he wanted to reassure himself that his body was his own again, and he gave it a few jerking strokes with one hand as he wriggled out of his boots and trousers with the other. 

“Mage?” Fenris murmured, sounding as breathless as Anders felt, voice like a charcoal smudge. He looked dazed, eyes dark and glazed over, the spots of light in them tiny golden blurs. 

“Yes,” Anders breathed, though he wasn’t sure if it came out as a proper word or an unintelligible grunt. Being able to form words with his mouth still felt strangely alien – after all, he rarely went long without talking when he had control of his own mouth – but he couldn’t say if it was from disuse or from Justice all but making him unhinge his jaw to take in as much of Fenris’s cock as possible. 

Before Fenris could respond, Anders reached up and grasped his wrist, tugging him down. Fenris sank to his knees with the smooth fluidity of a stream of honey drizzled from a spoon, and Anders lunged toward him, pressing his lips against Fenris’s so hard that his teeth cut into the soft flesh of his mouth. Fenris flinched, his gauntleted hand flying up to clutch at Anders’s shoulder, though Anders couldn’t tell if the needle-sharp bites of the fingerguards were meant to hold him in place or to repel him. He tasted the metallic tang of his own blood on his tongue and could see dark flakes of dried blood spiraling down from his cheeks and Fenris’s – what was a little more blood? After a moment, though, Fenris’s lips softened and parted beneath his, and the elf was kissing him back with a hectic fierceness. 

Without breaking the kiss, Anders nudged Fenris backward until he was sitting rather than kneeling. Anders had always had more limb than seemed strictly necessary and Fenris was tall for an elf, so it might all end in a messy tangle of arms and legs, but all Anders could think about was having Fenris inside him again – and he knew it was a desire quite separate from any urge of Justice’s; the spirit was quiet again, and Anders didn’t particularly care if it was a disappointed silence or a satiated one. He cast the grease spell, marveling briefly at how good it felt to tap the Fade, to feel magic flowing through his body, collecting in his fingertips, and then working his will. Sometimes magic felt almost like a lover whose touch one craved and missed when it was absent, will and desire and control all bound up together until it was difficult to tell where one ended and another began. 

Slowly, he lowered himself onto Fenris’s cock, gritting his teeth through the first twinge of pain, the slow burn that eventually surrendered to a feeling of fullness, of – oddly – completion. Fenris’s breath stuttered against the sweat-slickened skin of his shoulder, and a moment later, the elf’s arms encircled him, draping over his hips, one hand tracing the scar-mottled line of Anders’s spine. Anders tentatively rolled his hips forward, squeezing Fenris inside him, biting back a smile as he let out a ragged groan. 

Fenris’s arms tightened around him, and he buried his face against Anders’s throat, kissing and sucking at his pulse point in between his moans. Each cry stoked the fire that was building in Anders’s groin, heat flooding through him like a forest fire seeking more trees to consume, and yet as urgent as that pressure was, what he wanted more was for Fenris to unravel before him. As Justice had run his tongue over Fenris’s markings, Anders had been able – albeit distantly – to feel the elf unknot muscle by muscle, as if he were a cat’s cradle that Justice was slowly untangling, even as Fenris had hardened against him. He wanted to complete what Justice had begun and soothe the fight and the anger out of Fenris, to let him put down his sword for a while and surrender. 

He wrapped his arms around Fenris’s neck, sinking his fingers into the elf’s gossamer hair, anchoring himself as he ground his hips against Fenris’s. The underside of his cock brushed the flat planes of Fenris’s stomach with each rock of his hips, leaving trails of precome that shone silver in the moonlight dappling the room through the gaps in the rotten ceiling. He shuddered at each contact, torn between taking himself in hand – or begging Fenris to – and concentrating on making it last as long as possible, the entwining of their limbs, the feel of Fenris filling him, Fenris’s willingness to be near him. Anders pressed his lips against the elf’s cheeks, nose, closed eyelids, every part of him that he could reach that wasn’t marked with lyrium, every patch of skin that Justice had neglected. 

Fenris’s hands slid down his back, fingers splayed wide, and then gripped his arse, clutching at the muscle, the steel tips of his gauntlet opening up five tiny cuts in one cheek. He was thrusting up into Anders, meeting every roll of Anders’s hips, his breath hot and rapid against his throat. Now and then, a blunt tooth would scrape against his neck, followed quickly by a flick of Fenris’s tongue, as if he could wipe away the scratch. Though he was well beyond feeling any pain, Anders cast Cleansing Aura, tiny feathers of healing magic brushing away the pinprick wounds on his arse and shoulder, the cuts on his cheek and the matching ones on Fenris’s. He held onto the connection to the Fade longer than necessary, content to let magic flood him, knowing that it was his to use as he wished again. It built inside him along with his orgasm – he knew he’d have to release both of them eventually, but it was a grudging acceptance. 

“Can I use magic, Fenris?” he panted in Fenris’s ear before tracing its lobe with his tongue. Fenris shivered against him and let out a soft grunt that Anders chose to believe meant “yes”. Barely touching Fenris, he pressed the tip of his middle finger between the elf’s shoulder blades and cast his electricity trick, sending minute jolts down his spine to his arse. He let the magic prickle over Fenris’s skin first, feeling goosebumps rise beneath his fingertip, but then he sent it deeper, into flesh and muscle, from Fenris’s arse to his balls to the base of his cock. Purple sparks arced off of Fenris, flitting through the darkness of the room like wisps through the Fade. 

Fenris groaned something in Tevene into Anders’s neck, the words rough as the point of a blade dragged across stone, and Anders felt his cock throb inside him as he came. He expected Fenris to pull away, maybe bring Anders off with his hand, but instead Fenris stayed sunk deep inside of him and forced him onto his back, sliding his hands from Anders’s arse up his flanks to pin his arms over his head. He was struck once more by how _muscular_ Fenris was, how heavily his weight pressed down on him. Anders arched against that weight, not trying to throw Fenris off of him now but instead trying to gain some friction against his cock, knowing that soon Fenris would be slipping out of him and, considering their earlier argument, maybe leaving him there on the floor alone. 

Anders could feel Fenris softening inside him, but the elf was still rocking his hips against him, shallow, fluttering thrusts, the soft skin of his balls pressing against Anders’s arse. Each thrust caressed the spot inside him that made him shake as if he were racked by fever, limbs trembling, teeth almost chattering as wave after wave of ecstasy washed over him until he no longer feared the templars or death or Tranquility. He squeezed his eyes shut, willing himself to come, wanting to be free of that ever-growing pressure that pushed his mind to the periphery as easily as Justice had, even as he wanted it to last. 

Then the weight on his arms lifted, and Fenris’s hands were cradling his face, fingertips as delicate as a moth lighting on his cheekbones, thumbs brushing over his lips until they were replaced by Fenris’s mouth. Anders opened his eyes once more to find Fenris’s staring directly into them, pinning him down as effectively as his hands had. 

“I wanted it to be you,” Fenris murmured, his voice tight with strain. “Nothing is going to keep me from you, mage. Not the templars, not the Qunari, not your spirit.” 

One last push of Fenris’s hips, and Anders was coming, crying out until his throat was raw, his come splattering his stomach, his chest, the bottom of his chin. He collapsed against the floorboards, still shaking, clinging to Fenris as if to tether himself to the ground while simultaneously wanting to push the elf away, his body too overwhelmed by sensation. 

And yet part of him had the same inexplicable desire – though with a far different motivation behind it – that he remembered from the night they’d tried to rescue Karl, that urge to somehow sink into Fenris when his markings were alight. Then, he had hoped to die while Justice could slip back into the Fade through the elf’s connection to it, but now it was the feeling of closeness he wanted – he didn’t want to become Fenris or merge with the elf the way he had with Justice, but he wanted them to be separate somehow from the rest of the world, together, sufficient unto themselves. But how could they? Fenris may have finally outwitted his hunters, but Anders never would, and Justice wouldn’t allow him to hide from a world where his fellow mages still lived under perpetual threat. 

He stared up at the rents in the ceiling with dazed eyes. Perhaps they still had some time. Perhaps Dumar would recover, and Anders could go back to the Mage Underground under the watchful eye of Fenris from the outside and Justice from within. Progress would be slow, like the pockmarks in the stone of the dungeons at Kinloch Hold, pitted by dripping water, but it would be progress all the same. _Justice loves me in his way_ , he thought. _He will not let me be taken. Fenris loves me too, I think. He won’t either._

Fenris ran the tip of his tongue over Anders’s sternum, up his outstretched neck, and over his chin, licking away the beads of come clinging to Anders’s stubble, letting out a low, appreciative sound from deep in his throat. Anders’s cock twitched at the noise, and a shiver ran through him as Fenris kissed him, brushing his tongue over Anders’s as if to share the taste of his come. He groaned into Fenris’s mouth, one hand slipping down to the elf’s arse as if to hold him inside, even though the sensitivity of even having Fenris’s soft cock in him was becoming unbearable. 

“I’m sorry,” he said when Fenris pulled away to press his lips along Anders’s jawline, behind his ears, down his neck. “I lost control. Of myself, of Justice.” He curled one arm around Fenris’s neck, threading his fingers through the sweat-soaked waves of hair above the nape of it. “You shouldn’t have gotten mixed up with me in the first place. I should have warned you….” 

“I knew you were an abomination,” Fenris murmured against his throat, following the words with a kiss as if the sweetness of it could remove the sting of “abomination”. “Your entire being is a warning, mage.” Gingerly, Fenris slid out of him and stretched out beside him on the floor – as if he were a lodestone and Fenris iron, Anders automatically turned onto his side to face him. “I… I made a choice. I was free to make that choice,” Fenris said, his voice a mix of softness and roughness, like the deep, contented purr of a cat. “I’ve no idea if I’ll ever be sure _why_ I made it, but I did.” He fanned his thumb over Anders’s cheek, the steel of his gauntlet scraping Anders’s skin like a finely honed razor. “Whatever future there is, whatever foes you may face, I will gladly be at your side.” 

Throat clotted and thick with emotion, Anders nudged his forehead against Fenris’s, hearing the faintest bell-like chime of the lyrium song reverberate against his skin. “Thank you. For trusting me. Finally,” he said, smiling as laughter rumbled low in Fenris’s chest. 

They lay there entwined on the dusty, partly rotten floor in the half-dark, teetering on the brink of sleep. Anders’s joints complained, as if to remind him that there was a fairly comfortable bed a few floors below, complete with cats willing to act as warm compresses for any aches and pains, but he couldn’t make himself get up. It was as if they’d been woven into a cocoon, the silk so thin as to be invisible, binding them together while separating them from the rest of Kirkwall. Even the usual noises of Hightown at night – the singing of drunks stumbling home from the Rose, the howls of dogs, the screeching of night birds – seemed muted and muffled. If he moved, that fragile silk would snap, and that feeling that Fenris would always be slightly out of his grasp would settle in again. 

Somewhere, not far away, a bell began to toll, long, deafening peals. Another joined it, then another, until all of Hightown vibrated with the clangor, the sound bouncing off the white marble of the mansion facades, the gilded domes of the Chantry, the stone towers of the Keep. 

“ _Fasta vass_ , what is that?” Fenris muttered. Anders reached out for him as he rose and went over to the window, but his hand was left hanging uselessly in the air, closing around nothing. Moonlight limned Fenris’s naked body with silver as he stood at the window, puddling in the indentations of his muscles, gleaming on his single gauntlet, making his markings glitter like quartz. Anders let his hand drop back to the floor – the boards were already cool, as if Fenris had never lain there. 

“The Viscount is dead,” Anders said. His throat felt furred with the same dust that caked his limbs from lying on the filthy floor. “Long live Viscount Saemus Dumar.”


	25. Chapter 25

Summer came round again, covering the city like a thick, warm, foul-smelling paste of the sort Anders used to treat infected wounds. There would be no healing under that stagnant layer of heat and humidity, though. It would not be peeled back come autumn to reveal a new, clean, unscarred city. Kirkwall could only fester beneath it, decay and corruption sinking ever deeper into the bedrock.

Not much had changed in the first few months of Saemus Dumar’s reign as Viscount. Fireworks had burst in the sky on Satinalia, bright and riotous as the flowers in the jungles of Seheron, and Fenris and Anders had watched them from the top of the mansion, passing a cheap bottle of wine from the Hanged Man back and forth until Anders’s eyes swirled bright and blue as the fireworks and Justice decided that he’d had enough. First Day had been spent trailing Anders through the hovels of Darktown as he delivered what little food he could lay hands on to the worst-off of his patients and healed any lingering ailments from the winter until his mana ran out. 

By Wintersend, though, the air in Kirkwall had changed, and Hightown stank of Qunari _gaatlok_ and stone dust as disused buildings were demolished near the Chantry to make way for a Viddathlok, though Fenris was certain it was a mistake on the Viscount’s part – the Qunari didn’t have grand cathedrals or chantries filled with gold statues and sprawling frescoes, nor did anyone in Hightown seem at all interested in converting to the Qun other than the Viscount himself. Still, Saemus had demanded that the Qun be given equal footing in Kirkwall, and while the Qunari themselves didn’t seem to care – if anything, they still avoided Hightown and set up makeshift Viddathloks of their own in the slums of Lowtown and Darktown – the nobility and the Chantry howled at the injustice. 

With the change in the air came a change in Anders as well. It wasn’t that the mage was indifferent – he still went through the motions of working with the Mage Underground, of shuffling through the pages of his manifesto at night when Fenris was trying to sleep; he’d even concocted a ridiculously, and in Fenris’s opinion needlessly, circuitous method of seeing patients that managed to avoid the templars and the Qunari. Fenris was sure it was Justice working Anders like a puppet most of the time, to the point of physical exhaustion, and it was in the quiet moments when they were alone that he noticed how withdrawn the mage was, the teasing gleam in his golden-brown eyes tamped down, the crooked grins mere eye-blinks in duration, if they appeared at all. He even missed the little jokes at his expense, crisp and tart as green apples. 

At night, he let his markings fill with light until the mage had fallen asleep, hoping their glow would make Anders feel safe enough to rest, while the Fade shining through them would lull the spirit inside of him into inactivity for a few hours. The lyrium brands burned, but seeing their faint gleam on Anders’s closed eyelids, shifting as he dreamt, was worth the irritation. 

Fenris could remember now when he’d first taken up the sword after a childhood of doing nothing harder than delivering messages for his master or picking fruit in the estate’s orchards, how his hands had been a weeping mess of blisters the first week, how the pommel of his sword had slipped in the blood and pus. But then, over weeks and months, calluses had formed, hard and smooth, so thick that he could hold his hand over a candle flame and only know that it was searing his flesh from the odor of cooking meat. That was how Anders seemed to him now – callused – and he marveled that the man had survived a year of solitary confinement, the Deep Roads, and the death of his former love only to be subdued by the politics of a failing city-state in the Free Marches. 

He should have known there would be a price. Everything had a price. His family’s freedom had been paid for in his blood and flesh and memories, and his own bought with the lives of the Fog Warriors. Why would his contentment have been any different? Perhaps it felt different because the source of that contentment was also the price being demanded. And then he understood the alteration in Anders – the difference was _hope_. At the Circle Tower in Ferelden, Anders had had the hope of escape; with the Grey Wardens, he’d had the hope of making it to Kirkwall and being reunited with his friend; and after the loss of Karl, Justice had given him hope of fighting for freedom for mages. But now it seemed that Anders had been chased into an alley, one way blocked by the Chantry, the other by the Qunari – no escape, no hope, nothing but the inevitability of a life in the shadows at best and death at worst. 

Fenris, with a curdling of his stomach, realized that _he_ wasn’t enough, that perhaps he was even prolonging Anders’s suffering by protecting that which Anders no longer wanted. And yet selfishly he could not stop himself from following so closely on the mage’s heels that he often trod on them, from hovering so closely by Anders’s side when he worked on his patients that the mage sometimes gave him exasperated looks as he nudged him out of the way. Still, Anders never made him feel as if he weren’t enough – even when he was at his most withdrawn, he still returned Fenris’s kisses with a heat that turned the icy splinter of fear that congealed in Fenris’s stomach during the day to vapor in a second. 

Treating his patients should have been a comfort, but as more and more of the Ferelden refugees and alienage elves converted to the Qun, even that became a source of anxiety. Fenris knew they were being fed a simplified version of the Qun intended for Viddathari, mere pap compared to the tough meat of the Qun followed by the Qunari in Par Vollen, but a few of them asked far too many questions of Anders about his magic for Fenris’s liking, and more than a few shepherded their children away from the mage as soon as he had finished healing them. 

  
The spring winds that usually brought a few weeks of fresh, clean air to Kirkwall instead brought the massive, spiked silhouette of a Qunari dreadnought on the horizon. In Hightown, the nobles buzzed with the gossip that the Qunari were finally going back to Par Vollen, that they had used their influence with the new Viscount merely to secure their way home. But soon enough those rumors died, as the dreadnought anchored at the docks and disgorged rank after rank of Qunari – Tamassrans, Ben-Hassrath, and always more Stens and Saarebas with their Arvaraads close behind. They fanned out across the city and were quickly absorbed by it as if they had always been there. 

Soon the empty warehouses by the docks, formerly the domain of pirates, slavers, and smugglers, were converted into proper Viddathloks, manned by Ben-Hassrath to educate the kabethari of Kirkwall. On an errand for Anders to deliver a note to Mistress Selby, Fenris had passed by the open doors of one of them and glimpsed row upon row of elves, Fereldan refugees, and other denizens of Darktown being lectured by a towering, silver-skinned Viddasala. He thought he recognized the woman he and Anders had met in the Hanged Man so many months ago – Captain Isabela, she’d called herself – among the converts, though she scarcely looked the same, face expressionless, all the smolder gone from her eyes so they looked dull as coins passed between too many greasy fingers. He knew that look from his time on Seheron – the Ben-Hassrath had brought their _qamek_ with them. 

His feet couldn’t carry him back to Hightown and Anders quickly enough, and after that, he rarely left the mage’s side, accompanying Anders everywhere, from meetings with the Mage Undergound in Darktown to his usual monthly trip to the Blooming Rose just a few streets away from the mansion. Even the brothel had been changed by the rise of the Qunari -- a whole wing was now devoted to Tamassrans. Madam Lusine had shooed Anders away before he could be seen by any of the Qunari, but not before complaining about the men who went into the new wing looking for a ride on one of the strange, horned women and came out with their coin still in their pockets and their heads full of the Qun. 

It was almost a relief when, one evening as they sat in front of the fire, Anders said, “I’m going to give up seeing patients.” His words were directed more toward the flames than at Fenris, and the mage blinked as he said them, flinching as if he expected them to spit back at him like drops of oil thrown onto a hot pan. 

Fenris looked at him for a long moment before responding – Anders seemed bowed under the weight of a Saarebas’s collar and manacles already, shoulders slumped, body hunched over. Fenris knew that weight, the immobilizing heaviness of the collar, the chill slap of the chains against his bare skin with every movement. “That is… probably wise,” he said finally. “For now.” 

Anders buried his face in his hands, and his shoulders hitched convulsively. Fenris thought the mage was weeping, which was surely an understandable response, and yet he felt helpless at the idea of having to comfort him, not because he didn’t want to but because he knew any words he said would be insufficient. But when Anders’s hands fell from his face, his cheeks were dry, as were his eyes as they stared into the fire. “You make it sound as if it’s temporary.” 

“It could very well be,” Fenris replied. He shifted uncomfortably in his armchair, remembering too well the response he’d received the last time he’d suggested leaving Kirkwall and almost biting his tongue. But circumstances had changed – perhaps even Justice would be amenable to going somewhere Anders could do some good. “Or we could move on. There is no shortage of people in need in Thedas, after all.” 

“Am I just being selfish?” Anders demanded, jerking his head toward Fenris so abruptly that he recoiled from the suddenness and heat of the mage’s stare – it was like looking directly into a forge fire. 

“No.” Usually so flat and unadorned an answer would have lit a spark of irritation in Anders’s eyes, but now he seemed to relax, some of the tension leaving his face, his shoulders drooping again like the clipped wings of a tame bird. “There is a difference between selfishness and self-preservation,” Fenris continued. “You are saving yourself for future good. Even _he_ should know that.” 

“I thought I had found a place,” Anders murmured. He swallowed, mouth twisting as if he’d bitten into an unripe fruit. “Even if it was in the sewers. When those dwarves were asking after the Grey Warden, the refugees came together to hide me, but… I can’t trust that loyalty anymore.” 

“The poor of Kirkwall have found their place in the Qun,” Fenris said. “They’ve never had a place before either.” 

“But there is still nowhere for mages,” Anders spat. “I knew that – I’ve _known_ that. I was a fool to ever forget it, to ever think…” He shook his head with a laugh that was dry, caustic. “All I’ve ever wanted was to be able to _choose_ my path in life, and they have just given their choice away.” 

Fenris cleared his throat, trying to delay making a reply. He could see it from both sides – for years, his heels nipped by Danarius’s hounds, he’d wanted nothing more than to be free, but once he had achieved that freedom, he’d felt aimless, lost, in need of someone to tell him what he should be doing. 

“It’s fear,” Anders said, saving Fenris the need to answer. “It must be. The same fear that makes some mages _want_ to stay in the Circle.” He rubbed at one eyebrow with his fingertip, mussing the fine, dark gold hairs until Fenris wanted to smooth them back into place. “Perhaps the better question is what the Qunari want here. Kirkwall may have a lot of willing converts, but it’s still a shithole.” 

“They believe it is their duty to educate those who do not understand the Qun,” Fenris replied. “I cannot think of a place other than perhaps the Imperium that has rejected the basic concepts of the Qun as thoroughly as Kirkwall, so they have set themselves a challenge.” 

Anders let out a tiny sniff of laughter that immediately turned into a sigh. 

“From a military standpoint, maybe they are hoping to spread their influence widely enough to establish a second front for their war with the Imperium,” Fenris went on. “Whatever the reason, the Qunari do not merely occupy – they colonize. And they do not let anyone go to waste.” 

The crackling of the fire seemed unnaturally loud in the room in the wake of his words. Fenris could see Anders worrying at his lower lip with his teeth, brow creased in thought, firelight softening the sharp crests of his cheekbones and the jut of his long nose. He leaned forward, reaching out to catch one of the mage’s hands in his own. Anders’s hands had always been slender, but now he could feel every bone and tendon in them, and that familiar panic began to whir anew in his stomach like one of Danarius’s intricate clocks preparing to strike the hour. 

Only a heart’s beat of time passed before Anders squeezed his hand in return, but it felt like an age. “I need you to go back to the Gallows, love,” Anders said, the pad of his thumb making slow figures-of-eight around Fenris’s first two knuckles. 

“You do not think that Orsino will have changed his mind after the dreadnought’s arrival, do you?” Fenris asked. If anything, the need for templar protection was greater than ever for the Circle mages, now that the Qunari had their _qamek_ to hand. 

Anders shook his head. “No, but as worldly as Orsino likes to fancy himself, he may not know about the greater danger the Qunari pose now that they are… well-equipped.” His lips twisted with distaste. “Being given _qamek_ is not _exactly_ like being made Tranquil, from what I’ve learned.” The mage’s long fingers tightened around Fenris’s for a moment. “It sounds more like what Danarius was planning to do to you if he’d recaptured you, only without the blood magic and not just a wiping of the memory. A mage given _qamek_ would still be able to work magic but would otherwise be a mindless slave. The perfect Saarebas.” 

“So they would still be a danger,” Fenris muttered. He wasn’t completely surprised when Anders disentangled their fingers and pulled his hand away. 

“More of a danger than they would ever be inside the Circle… or outside,” Anders replied, his voice terse, tense as a wire pulled tight to garotte. “There are few mages who would _choose_ to be destructive killing machines, you know. And this would be done to the apprentices too. Children. They’ve never even gotten to live, not that being in the Kirkwall Circle really counts as living anyway.” He got up and went over to the long table where they’d used to practice Fenris’s writing but that recently had been taken over by the scattered pages of Anders’s manifesto. “I have to plant the seed in Orsino’s mind. I have to _try_. If I can be sure the mages are safe, maybe I – we – can leave Kirkwall.” 

He turned pleading eyes, wide and lustrous with hope, on Fenris, and Fenris sighed. A nagging whisper at the back of his mind wondered just who the “we” Anders referred to was – Anders and him or Anders and Justice, though he knew the answer was probably all three of them, which was at once a relief and a disappointment. 

“Very well. I will be your courier again, if that is what you require of me,” he said, not bothering to keep the impatience from his voice. 

He rose and left the warmth of the fire to look over the mage’s shoulder as he wrote. Though he still couldn’t understand most of the script, he enjoyed watching Anders’s long fingers flex and relax as he formed the elegant, swooping lines of the characters, so different from the sharp, angular letters the mage produced when he was working on his manifesto and seized by Justice. 

“But you must promise me that if Orsino will not listen to reason, your _spirit_ will be satisfied, and we can leave this cursed city.” 

Anders glanced up at him, then almost sheepishly lowered his eyes back to the page in front of him, his hand never slowing. “You know I can’t make a promise like that on Justice’s behalf.” 

Fenris snorted and turned to go back to the armchair or, better, out of house entirely, to get away from the incessant scratching of Anders’s quill, but the mage reached out and caught hold of his hand, pressing his lips to the knuckles. He let himself be reeled back toward Anders, even as he muttered, “He is free enough with committing you to things.” 

He felt Anders’s sigh more than heard it, an unfurling of breath cool on the burn of his lyrium brands. “I know you fear—” Anders broke off as Fenris tried to pull away from him and nuzzled his cheek against the back of Fenris’s hand as if in apology – perhaps he’d spent so much time with the cats that he’d picked up their habits, since Fenris had seen the Venerable Toe-Bean use the same gesture on the Viscount of Catwall after a spat. “—you want to live under the Qun as little as I do, but….” 

“I didn’t escape from slavery only to become a slave to myself,” Fenris said. 

Anders looked up at him, brow furrowed, his cheek still pressed to the back of Fenris’s hand as if he was trying to show Fenris he had a fever. “What in Andraste’s water closet does that mean?” 

“I’m… not sure,” Fenris replied. “But it sounded profound, didn’t it?” 

“You are always profound, love,” Anders said, giving him a brief grin that crinkled the corners of his eyes and reminded Fenris of the Anders he’d first met, the one who’d insisted that the templars had spared him because he was charming. “So profound that perhaps I should have you dictate this letter to Orsino for me. I can’t think of anything to write other than ‘Qunari plus _qamek_ plus mages equals danger! Very bad!’” 

“Even I can see that you’ve already written far more than that,” Fenris pointed out. “I hope that he will finally heed your warnings so we can begin planning our exit from Kirkwall.” 

****************

If Fenris had folded up all of Anders’s letters to Orsino and set them afloat on the bay in a tiny paper fleet, they would have been as much use as they were delivered safely to the First Enchanter’s hands. For weeks, it seemed that he was on the water more often than on land, crossing the bay from the docks to the Gallows and back. He’d been lucky that each time he’d gone to the Gallows, a different templar had been guarding the wicket gate, all of them blocky, meaty, dead-eyed fellows quite different from the Knight-Captain he’d met on his first visit. All of them easily swallowed down the story of the sister coming from Seheron to join the Circle, although one narrowly escaped having his heart torn from his chest when he licked his thin lips and said, “Good, I reckon we could do with more elf girls in this Circle.” 

Fenris headed toward the wicket gate, not making his usual detours to the various stalls, pretending to look at their wares as he scanned the area for the Knight-Captain. Not that such caution would have been of any help that particular morning, for before he even reached the gate, a familiar voice called out to him: “Serah Elf! Has your sister postponed her arrival again?” 

He stopped short and almost turned on his heel to return to the pier where the ferry bounced on the choppy water, but the plummy voice of the Knight-Captain, somehow even more smug than it had been before, was drawing closer. 

“I… uh…” Fenris began, but the templar interrupted him, a pleasant smile on his lips. 

“Just because I am not guarding this gate does not mean I am not aware of who passes through it,” he said, and to Fenris’s surprise, he detected no hint of a threat in the man’s words. The Knight-Captain began to walk back toward the wicket gate that led to the First Enchanter’s office, still talking companionably, as if he took it for granted that Fenris would follow him. At least he had the sense to lower his voice enough that Fenris could just make it out over the bustle of the marketplace. “I know you’ve been bringing letters to the First Enchanter. I don’t know the contents of any of them, of course – Orsino has been very careful to burn all of the missives – but I know they exist.” Cullen gave him a quick glance, his eyes narrowed slightly with what could have been a hint of amusement. 

“I had asked him for advice,” Fenris said. Lies still did not come to him easily, especially on the spur of the moment. 

“About your sister?” Cullen prompted, and Fenris clung to the suggestion as if it were a rope thrown over the side of a boat, nodding. “What became of her, if I may ask?” 

“She went to… uh, Ostwick,” Fenris replied. “I think. I try to concern myself with magic as little as possible.” 

“And yet you are a correspondent of the First Enchanter?” Cullen said with another stiff, hesitant smile. “And the brother of a mage. Curious. Curious, yet understandable. Many families wish to forget that any of their blood has been tainted by magic.” 

“I was a slave in the Tevinter Imperium,” Fenris said, trying and failing to keep the sneer out of his voice, “so yes, I wish to avoid magic as much as I can.” 

The Knight-Captain arched a brow at Fenris’s tone, but the look he gave him was appraising. “Curious, indeed,” he murmured. “You are an intriguing fellow, Serah.” 

“It was a life that was forced upon me, but… thank you,” Fenris muttered. 

Cullen gave him a slight bow of the head, but his fair eyebrows were knitted together as if in thought. “If you lived in the Imperium, you must know more of these Qunari than most. I admit that most of what I know of them, I learned in books from the Circle library.” 

“Yes,” Fenris answered carefully. “I was on Seheron for a time, while the Qunari were occupying it.” He wondered if he should warn the Knight-Captain too about the threat posed to the mages by the Qunari or if he should deliver the note to Orsino as Anders had asked and let the First Enchanter decide. If this templar believed that his purpose was to protect mages as much as to protect the rest of Thedas from them, surely he would be interested in the prospect of his charges being turned into mindless killing machines. “That was actually my reason for coming to see the First Enchanter,” he said, caution still slowing his words. “To share my knowledge of the Qunari with him.” 

The Knight-Captain stopped with a clank of armor and stared down at Fenris, loomed over him, if Fenris was honest – the man was as tall as Anders and made bulky by his plate and mail. “You have concerns about the Qunari’s intentions toward the Circle mages, and yet you went to the First Enchanter rather than the Knight-Commander? Or to me? It is, after all, my sworn duty to protect the mages under my care.” 

“The First Enchanter is much easier to get an audience with,” Fenris said. His brands itched at the templar’s closeness, at the scent of lyrium coming from his pores that was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It was not that he feared Cullen or even wanted to hurt him – which he easily could have done, even in the middle of the busy courtyard – but there was a wrongness about him that made Fenris feel like Knight-Commander Meowedith when she caught the scent of the neighbor’s hounds. “I doubt the Knight-Commander has time for an interview with an elf, and you weren’t around.” 

He tried smiling at Cullen, as if that would soothe the man’s nerves, but he was sure he might have just been baring his teeth. Fenris had no idea what his face did when he smiled, though Anders seemed to enjoy it, as did the Knight-Captain, who blinked a few times and then smiled shyly in return. 

“Well, you have me there,” Cullen said. “I can’t guarantee the Knight-Commander would have listened, even if you’d been granted an audience.” He began walking toward the wicket gate again, as if remembering his errand, and Fenris fell into step beside him. “You are aware, I am sure, that a Circle mage – even the First Enchanter – having unsupervised communication with someone outside the Circle is forbidden?” 

Fenris stumbled on the smooth white paving stones, and Cullen caught him by the elbow to right him, carefully avoiding the spikes of Fenris’s vambrace. His gauntleted hand hung in the air a moment after Fenris jerked out of his grasp, and his face grew serious once more. 

“You have shown a great deal of discretion, which is wise of you and whomever is sending these notes.” He swallowed hard, and when he spoke again, his voice was even softer. “I… do not disapprove. And I will not give you or the First Enchanter away to the Knight-Commander.” He rubbed the back of his neck, lowering his gaze to the paving stones, to Fenris’s bare lyrium-limned toes and the tip of his own heavy boot a few inches away. 

“I shouldn’t be telling you this – I don’t even know your name, for Maker’s sake, or who’s sending the letters you bring – but… the Knight-Commander has been sent mad by these Qunari. I have seen madness before, at the Ferelden Circle. I have seen it in myself….” He trailed off into silence, staring in the direction of the bay, as if he could see the Circle Tower in Ferelden rising above the horizon from across the Waking Sea. 

Fenris shifted awkwardly from foot to foot, waiting for the man to continue. He finally stifled a cough in his fist, and Cullen blinked, almost flinching at the sound, and seemed to come back to himself – the self he had been the first time Fenris had spoken to him, stiff, serious. 

“I apologize, Serah. I should not have—I simply meant to say that the Knight-Commander and I have a difference of opinion. She does not feel that the priority of the Templar Order in Kirkwall should be to protect the mages in the Circle from a possible Qunari threat. She thinks that our first responsibility is to protect the Chantry at all costs. As you know, I disagree. Most strenuously.” He turned abruptly and walked over to the wicket gate, unlocking it and holding it open for Fenris to pass through. “I believe you know the way by now.” 

“Yes, thank you,” Fenris murmured, feeling suddenly and embarrassingly apprehensive at being without a templar escort even for the short walk to the First Enchanter’s cell-like office. What if some templar recognized him and demanded to know why he had returned? Or, worse, what if a strange templar decided that his lyrium markings were a sign of magic and, in the course of hauling him off to the Circle, found Anders’s letter folded away in his belt pouch? 

He took the stairs two at a time and hurried down the short hall to Orsino’s office. The Gallows seemed even more tomb-like than usual, eerie in its silence, and Fenris noticed that the iron-studded door to the Knight-Commander’s office was shut tight. Orsino was seated at his desk, as he had been every time Fenris had delivered a note to him, but today he wasn’t writing a letter or rifling through paperwork – he was simply sitting, hands steepled on the desk before him, eyes staring into the middle distance. He seemed to have shrunk in the months since Fenris had first met him, his flesh pulled tight over his skull until he resembled a death’s head. His eyes flicked up when Fenris stepped through the doorway, the green of them too bright in that pale, grayish face. 

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, his voice neither welcoming nor unwelcoming, merely exhausted. “I suppose you’ve brought another of those hectoring letters, have you?” 

Fenris took the note from his belt pouch and slid it across the desk instead of answering. He always felt even more reticent than usual in the Gallows, whether out of a desire to go as unnoticed as possible or because he was afraid of giving something away. 

Orsino unfolded the letter and gave it a cursory scan before letting it fall back to the desk. “You can tell your master—” 

“I have no master,” Fenris snarled, almost as a reflex, though he was distantly surprised at the surge of anger that shot through him. 

The First Enchanter raised an eyebrow as if in irritation. “Employer? Friend? Something else?” 

Fenris felt his cheeks flare with heat and hoped that the shadows cast by the bars on the windows would hide his blushes. “Associate.” 

“Very well. Tell your _associate_ I am ready to act.” Fenris recognized the fatalism in Orsino’s voice – he had heard its like in Anders’s words often enough – but the First Enchanter’s tone seemed even more hopeless somehow, as if he’d already accepted that the odds against victory were so great that even attempting to fight would be ridiculous. 

Before he could stop himself, Fenris cast a worried glance over his shoulder at the closed door to the Knight-Commander’s office. 

“Don’t worry about being overheard by her,” Orsino said, a smirk twisting his thin face. “She is at the Chantry, finalizing plans for her journey to Val Royeaux.” 

“Val Royeaux?” Fenris blurted. “But that must mean….” 

Orsino nodded. “Yes, she is requesting the Right of Annulment.” 

A chill shuddered down Fenris’s spine. He knew he had to tell Anders – of course he had to tell Anders; what else was he doing in the Gallows if not acting as a go-between for the mage? – but he wished that he had never heard the First Enchanter’s words, never taken the burden of them onto himself. He would rather have carried a boulder back across the bay and up the steps to Hightown to lay at Anders’s feet. As it was, giving the mage this message was tantamount to handing him that boulder and then shoving him into the sea. 

He tried to work some moisture back into his mouth, but when he spoke again, his voice still came out as a muffled croak. “Is there any other message?” 

“We will have to work quickly, as I’m certain the Knight-Commander will leave plenty of _instructions_ for her absence. Is there anywhere safe where I could meet with your associate?” Orsino asked. “I have some freedom to move at night, if I’m careful.” 

“Very well. I will return with an answer as soon as possible,” Fenris said. The First Enchanter nodded in response to the quick bow Fenris gave him out of habit and seemed to dismiss him, but Fenris lingered a moment by the open door. “Do you believe that the Knight-Commander’s request will be granted?” he asked, watching the point of his fingerguard carve a runnel out of the wood of the doorjamb. 

“Does it even matter?” Orsino replied, his voice like acid. “If the Qunari make any move against the Chantry or the mages in the Gallows, Meredith will invoke it herself, even without the Divine’s approval. We mages will always be expendable to them. Our very existence is an inconvenience even to those whose purpose is to _watch over_ us.” The caustic edge in his voice dulled, replaced with that bone-deep exhaustion Fenris was all too familiar with. “I don’t know why they don’t simply drown us at birth.” 

It was on the tip of Fenris’s tongue to tell him that the Knight-Captain, at least, still adhered to his purpose, but he swallowed the words down. They were not his to speak, nor could he guarantee that Cullen would stand by them when faced with a ruling from the Divine herself


	26. Chapter 26

He found Anders where he’d left him that morning – sprawled on the worn rug in the room where they slept, teasing the cats with the cord that usually held his hair back. Anders scrambled to his feet when Fenris came in, at least, shoving his hair out of his eyes.

“Well?” he asked, his face looking paler than usual amid its halo of red-gold hair, the hint of a flush on his cheeks a lurid red against the whiteness. 

“Meredith is going to Val Royeaux,” Fenris replied, unstrapping his gauntlets and dropping them on the table. He felt no relief at having dispensed with the news quickly, though, and his stomach clenched at the sight of Anders sagging at the knees and catching himself on the back of one of the armchairs. 

“ _Maker_ ,” Anders breathed. “I had not thought…” He trailed off, and Fenris heard a gulp as Anders swallowed hard, as if trying to hold back sick. “But I should have known.” His eyes flickered toward Fenris, the gold of them bright and searing as sparks. “Does Orsino have any plans? Or is he just going to accept it like he has everything else?” 

“He wants to meet with you,” Fenris said. “And the rest of the Mage Underground, I assume.” 

“And no doubt bring the templars down on our heads. The man is as incompetent as the Knight-Commander is mad,” Anders said, lip curling. “But I suppose there’s no other choice, is there?” 

Fenris remained silent. It wasn’t his fight, or so he kept trying to tell himself. He didn’t want freedom for mages – he wanted freedom for _one_ mage, and the chains that held Anders were mostly inside of his own head. “I can go and watch your back,” he said finally. “I may not be able to dispatch an entire squadron of templars, but I can give you a warning and a head-start.” 

The thought that maybe, just maybe, Knight-Captain Cullen would keep the templar patrols away from any potential meeting flitted through his head, but he bit his lip to keep from saying anything of it. If Anders knew about Cullen’s involvement, he might balk altogether, and at the moment, working with Orsino seemed like the only possible stratagem. 

Anders sank into one of the armchairs, the feathers on his pauldrons fluttering as he let out a long, deep sigh. His hand rose as Fenris walked past the chair, an odd, aborted gesture, his knuckles brushing against the side of Fenris’s leggings as he went by. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It won’t be much longer.” 

The hollow, desolate tone of his voice made Fenris’s stomach clench – Anders sounded as if he were calling up from the bottom of a well. He stood behind Anders’s chair, grasping the back of it before slowly sliding his fingers into the mage’s hair. Casual physical affection didn’t come naturally to Fenris, but Anders seemed to soak it up like parched earth swallowing up rain. Anders arched upward into his touch, and Fenris combed his fingers through his hair, letting it slip and slither over them. The feel of it reminded him of Danarius’s silk robes and how they slid through his hands, soft and cool against the brands on his palms, a rare respite of pleasure in an otherwise miserable existence. He bent to nudge his face into that gleaming gold that seemed warmed with the heat of the sun – it smelled of silk too, that faint, round, earthy odor. 

“You said it would be like this everywhere,” he murmured, pressing a kiss to the top of Anders’s head. 

“I mean in Kirkwall,” Anders said, his voice strangely light. He tilted his head back to look up at Fenris. “You sound like Justice when you do that. A rumble in my head.” The upside-down curve of his smile slowly unbowed. “Except I actually want to listen to you. Most of the time.” 

“Have you… consulted _him_ on the matter?” Fenris asked, coiling a lock of hair around his finger and letting it unspool. 

“Justice?” Anders shook his head, wincing when the gesture tugged his hair. “No. He will make me do what he wants anyway, when it comes down to it.” 

“But his input could be valuable,” Fenris suggested carefully, barely believing he was speaking the words even as they came out of his mouth. The spirit was single-minded, it was true, but perhaps if Anders discussed plans with him before putting them into action, Justice would be less likely to take over and lash out at whomever was within reach of Anders’s magic. 

Anders bowed his head, hiding his expression from Fenris, and his hands worried at one of the round buckles on his ragged coat. “Actually, I’m going to be trying something – horrible timing, I know, but it might be necessary – and I want you to be part of it, Fenris, if you’ll help me.” 

He sounded hesitant, which Anders rarely was, in Fenris’s experience. If anything, the mage often didn’t hesitate _enough_. Fenris untwined his fingers from Anders’s hair and sat down in the armchair opposite him. “You have already gotten me tangled up in helping mages. I can’t imagine what you could need that you think I might refuse you at this point.” 

That earned the faintest crooked smile from Anders, the briefest upturning of one corner of his lips before his face disappeared from view once again behind a golden curtain of hair. “What I did with Justice was unnatural,” he went on, his voice sad but earnest. Fenris could imagine the pinched pleat between his brows even though he couldn’t see it. “It should never have happened.” 

“You’ll hear no disagreement from me there,” Fenris replied. “But is there anything that can be done to undo it?” 

Anders’s fingers tightened around the buckle of his coat until the worn fabric creaked in protest. “I’ve been researching the methods of Tevinter magisters.” 

Fenris hissed between his teeth and bolted to his feet, darting away from Anders’s chair before the mage could reach out for him. “I should not be surprised,” he spat. “No matter how far I go or how long I am away, the touch of the magisters will always reach me, it seems.” 

“Fenris—” Anders protested, voice as heavy and flattened by exhaustion as Orsino’s had been. 

“It’s blood magic, isn’t it? Who were you planning to drain for this ritual? Yourself? Me? Some Darktown orphan no one would miss?” 

He would have expected Justice to come storming forward, filling the room with the thunder of his voice, or at least Anders to raise his own voice to contradict him, with that little crack that fissured it when he was at his most passionate. But the mage just sat there, heels of his hands pressed to his temples, fingers digging into his scalp so hard that they turned deep red and then the bright white of sun-bleached bone with the pressure, as if Justice were clamoring to burst out of his head and he was trying to hold him in. 

“I told you there would always be a reason why mages have to do this, and I suppose you’ve finally found yours,” Fenris said, his jaw aching from being clenched so tightly. 

“I have never used blood magic nor will I ever,” Anders said, and the words were a bright blade slicing through the dust-choked dimness of the room. “You should know that by now. You should _trust_ me by now. And you know that Justice wouldn’t allow it even if I were willing. Which I’m not.” 

Each syllable was more bitten off than the last, and even through his anger, Fenris was distantly glad to see the mage muster up the energy to defend himself. Still, he was by no means mollified. “The magisters care only for power. Why would they even have researched such a thing? Unless they intended to bind a spirit to their will and then dispose of it when they had twisted it into a demon. Much as you have done to yours, I suppose.” He let out a snort of derisive laughter that had no amusement in it. “Perhaps it is the perfect match after all.” 

Such a statement usually would have made cracks of blue light spread over Anders’s skin, would have brought Justice out for a deafening scolding about how he wasn’t a demon. It was with a confused, disappointed quiver in his stomach that Fenris realized that he’d _wanted_ the spirit to come forward to defend itself – didn’t Justice sense the danger this scheme posed? – and dissuade Anders from this madness. But it was the mage who pushed himself out of his chair so violently that it skittered across the floor and overturned; it was the mage’s face, contorted with anger, so close to his own that he could smell the elfroot on his breath and the lyrium that he could no long smell on himself but could easily pick out when Anders had been drinking potions; the mage’s hands, their long-fingered grace belying the strength with which they gripped Fenris’s upper arms, pinning him against the wall. 

“ _Maker’s ballbag_ , Fenris, will you just _listen_?” Anders said, each word punctuated with a shove, pushing him against the crumbling plaster of the wall behind him. “There is a _very_ good reason why I had to look to Tevinter for the solution. They’re the only ones who value a mage’s life enough to try to reverse spirit possession instead of just beheading the victims.” 

Fenris blinked. Was that how Anders felt? How mages in the south were actually treated? As if they had no value? Even a slave had value, so long as he was able to work. “Do you see yourself as a victim?” he asked, unable to concede the point, as if doing so would be tantamount to admitting that the Imperium was perhaps not wrong in _all_ things. “I thought you made a choice. For a _friend_.” 

Some of the pressure eased off of Fenris’s shoulders as Anders took a step back. “No,” he said softly, looking down, fine brows drawn together. “If anything, I see Justice as the victim. Though neither of us knew exactly what would happen. But he’s the one who had to choose between death and sharing what I’m sure wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice of a physical being.” 

He was glad that the mage had decided to keep his gaze fastened to the floor – whether it was from sadness, embarrassment, or dissembling. That way Anders wouldn’t see the fear that was no doubt written on Fenris’s face; he had learned during his years as a slave to hide his emotions – when he allowed himself to feel them at all – but Anders was more perceptive than Tevinter nobles who didn’t really look at slaves anyway and who certainly never stood this close to them face-to-face. If he hadn’t had better control of himself, his knees would have been knocking with fear, his teeth would have been chattering. 

What if this mad ritual killed Anders? Or, worse, what if it transformed him into a stranger? He’d said in the past that Fenris would not have liked him before he’d merged with Justice… and it had taken Fenris long enough to like him as it was. And what would become of all that? Fenris had never imagined that having a superfluity of feeling for anyone would be a problem, but if Anders was no longer Anders, if the vessel that he’d been pouring that feeling into was reshaped new or disappeared, where would that feeling go? 

Anders swung his eyes up to look at him, a gaze like two doors thrown wide open to reveal a room, safe and warm with firelight. “I thought of it because of you,” he said. “I had thought that Justice was gone, was just another part of me. But after what happened upstairs last year… I knew he was still here, still himself. And he deserves freedom, just like anyone else.” 

Fenris’s cheeks burned. He knew exactly what Anders was referring to, and the memory made his gut churn with something that was equal parts trepidation and desire. He swallowed, trying to work some moisture back into his mouth, and asked, “So what is this _thing_ you’re planning?” 

“I believe I have a formula for a potion that can separate Justice and me. Without killing either,” Anders replied. Fenris could see the excitement in his eyes like live embers in banked coals, though he could tell Anders was trying to hide it. He imagined Anders as an apprentice, that same proud, excited sparkle lighting his eyes when he cast a spell correctly for the first time or when he healed a wound without the help of his mentor. The idea should have disgusted him, but Orsino’s words – _I don’t know why they don’t simply drown us at birth_ – rang in his mind, and all he felt was sadness, searing him as deeply as the lyrium in his markings had, sadness for these children growing up as blighted as saplings kept out of the sun. Now that he could remember more of his own life, he knew that even he, a slave born to slaves, had had something of a carefree childhood, playing in the sunshine with Varania, feeling the black earth between his bare toes, the warm rain on his face. 

“Is it dangerous?” he made himself ask, doing a poor job of sounding disinterested. Not that Anders would have been duped for a moment even if he’d managed it – the mage had to know by now how Fenris felt about him. 

“You know there are always dangers with magic,” Anders said. He had let go of Fenris’s arms, but one hand still wallowed in the curve of Fenris’s neck into his shoulder, the tip of his thumb brushing back and forth over where Fenris’s pulse drummed. “But I believe this will be worth the cost. For all of us.” 

“And it truly does not use blood magic?” 

“Yes. Though I almost _wish_ it were blood that was required,” Anders replied with a quick smile. His hand slid upward so his thumb could trace the angle of Fenris’s jaw and follow the curve of his chin. “I’ve gathered most of the ingredients already, but there are a few outlandish ones I was hoping you could help me with.” 

“What do you require?” Fenris asked, not sure if the tremor in his voice was due to worry or the soft, circling graze of the pad of Anders’s thumb on his lower lip. “I haven’t much coin, but….” 

“Mages in the Free Marches don’t use these ingredients, so they can’t be bought,” Anders said. “All I need is a small amount of drakestone and a powder called _sela petrae_.” The name was vaguely familiar to Fenris, though he’d never paid much attention to Danarius’s work with potions, out of fear that the magister would test his concoctions on him. “It’s crystallized piss and shit, so there should be plenty of it in the sewers. Now you see why I’d prefer the blood.” 

“Is that all? Just the potion? No… ritual?” he asked. 

“No, no ritual,” Anders said, giving his head a quick, emphatic shake that made his loose hair fall into his face. Fenris reached up and tucked it behind his ear, stroking both the silky hair and the curve of Anders’s ear with his fingertips. “Just mix the ingredients up and… boom. Justice and I are free.” 

“Free to leave Kirkwall? Free to leave this pointless quest for mages’ rights behind?” Fenris asked. He didn’t believe in Anders and Justice’s crusade, didn’t have a stake in it beyond Anders’s safety, and yet still he felt a needle-stab of pain – conscience, perhaps? Or an echo of vicarious hurt from Anders? – at the harshness of his words. The mage himself probably didn’t know how deeply Justice’s influence had stained him – was it temporary, like the ink marks on his fingers that faded after a few washings, or was it a tattoo, indelibly embedded in him? Maybe freedom would not be free after all. 

Anders’s eyes narrowed, cinching at the corners with either hurt or anger. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice brittle and cold as frost on the edges of a puddle. Anger, then. “I don’t know who I’ll be or what I’ll care about once Justice is gone.” The threat lingered like a chill in the air, so cold that Fenris expected his breath to turn to streamers of white mist between them. 

“I have no desire to participate in any sort of magic, but if you need my help to collect these materials, you will have it,” Fenris said, knowing the hesitance was clear in his voice. 

Still, his words seemed to satisfy Anders, who gave him an embarrassingly grateful smile and stepped away to right the chair he’d knocked over. He sat down, resting his elbows on his knees and scrubbing one hand over his face. His hand rested on his brow, as if he were shading his eyes from the sun. “I don’t like asking you to do these things either, but Kirkwall has become far too dangerous for me to act on my own. Maybe it always was.” When he glanced up at Fenris again, his eyes were feverishly bright, shining like two newly minted gold sovereigns. “I need you, Fenris. I hope that nothing will change after….” Anders trailed off, looking away again, leaving Fenris feeling as if the mage’s eyes had been brass nails tacking him to the wall and he’d been suddenly freed. 

“I know I don’t speak of my childhood much,” Anders said softly. “I try not to think of it really. It’s too easy to dwell on everything that was taken from me.” He cleared his throat and sat staring at his fingers plucking at the threads of the chair’s worn upholstery. 

Fenris silently willed him to go on – he was curious at the sudden change of subject, but he also wanted to hear more about the mage’s life before he’d been taken to the Circle, though he couldn’t tell if it was natural curiosity or jealousy or a perverse need to reassure himself that he’d always been worse off than Anders. He let himself slip to the floor, resting his crossed arms on his raised knees, as if he were a child waiting to be told a story. 

He heard Anders’s lips part with a soft, damp click, and finally the mage continued, “One spring, one of the lambs wandered off, and my father told me to bring it back. I don’t know how it got so far on its wobbly baby legs, but it took me most of the day to find it. It had been raining all afternoon, and I was soaked to the skin by the time I found the little bugger, so I tucked it in my jacket and started to head back. We were both wet and hungry and tired, so I decided to take a shortcut through a dry stream bed. I got caught by a squall, a wall of brown, churning water heading straight for me, and the only chance to escape it was to climb up a little tree growing in the stream bed. It looked too small to hold my weight, but I scrambled up it and held the trunk with one arm and the lamb with the other and prayed to the Maker and Andraste and anyone else who would listen for that tree to stay rooted in the ground.” 

The mage leaned forward, reaching out one hand to Fenris, and Fenris took it, a light grip, as if they were dancing like a pair of Hightown nobles, letting Anders gently trace the lyrium markings with his thumb. 

“The water rose and rose until it was up to my knees, tugging at me, beaten to a froth by the wind, but the tree held firm through the storm. When the squall was over and the water receded, I climbed down and took that blighted lamb home and was whipped by my father for taking so long.” Anders’s smile was that small, lopsided one, bitter as lemon pith, the one that made Fenris want to kiss the opposite corner of his mouth until it curled up to match the other. “I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I think of you as that tree, Fenris. And not just because I want to climb you.” The smile deepened briefly to a smirk before disappearing. “It’s just… I think of you as something to cling to, and I’m going to have to in what’s to come. I just hope that I’ll be able to hold on through this storm with Justice.” He laced his fingers through Fenris’s, squeezing tight, pressing their hands palm to palm. 

Fenris rose to his knees, using their joined hands to pull Anders toward him until their foreheads rested against one another’s, the gold of Anders’s hair mingling with the silver of Fenris’s. “I will not let you go, mage,” he whispered, his voice harsh with determination. He had faced magic before, had been changed by it, broken by it, but he had survived. He would see that Anders did the same.


	27. Chapter 27

“As little as I care for having magic worked on me,” Fenris said, his voice slow and rich as dark treacle on a cold day, “if you knew a spell to rid me of this stench, I would gladly let you cast it.”

“I’ll have you know I exchanged a very expensive salve for this soap,” Anders replied. He scrubbed Fenris’s scalp, feeling the lyrium embedded in it humming beneath his fingertips, the elf’s wet hair slipping through his fingers like silver minnows. The lather smelled of orange blossoms, which was why he’d chosen it from the other perfumed things the companion from the Rose he’d gotten it from had offered – the hard, bitter yet beautiful scent had reminded him of Fenris. The elf seemed preoccupied with cleanliness, always polishing his armor, scrubbing his clothing clean of the smallest speck of blood or spider viscera, bathing almost nightly, so Anders knew the trip to the sewers for the _sela petrae_ would send him into a frenzy of washing. The area around the Blooming Rose was crawling with templars and Qunari in equal measure, but he’d managed to sweet-talk Sabina into an alley and barter for one of the scented soaps all the companions used. “She offered me an Orlesian special instead, but I told her I was spoken for and would rather have the soap. What have I become?” 

Fenris rewarded him with one of his low chuckles, deep in his chest, making the surface of the water ripple with its vibrations. “You’re next. Unless you want to sleep with the cats in the courtyard tonight.” He tilted his head back, craning his slender neck to look up at Anders. “Are you going to make the potion right away?” 

Anders could hear the faintest twinge of anxiety in his voice, and he pretended to busy himself with lathering up more soap to hide his smile. Not that he should have bothered – the smile itself was short-lived as guilt swallowed the tiny spark of pleasure he always felt when Fenris showed any concern for him, that little flush of awe at being wanted, looked after, _remembered_. He filled his cupped hand with warm bathwater and dribbled it over Fenris’s forehead and into his hair, still not meeting his eyes. “No, not tonight. I’m not sure when… perhaps I should meet with Orsino again first, finalize the plans for the mages if the news comes from Val Royeaux that the Divine has granted Meredith her wish.” 

The tension left Fenris’s face, his knitted brow smoothing, and he sank back down into the water, letting Anders rinse the soap from his hair. 

“Thank you,” Anders said, “for helping me. I know it wasn’t pleasant.” Fenris had made no secret of just how unpleasant he’d found it either. Complaining while trudging through sewage was fair enough, Anders figured, but the elf had griped all the way up to the abandoned Bone Pit mine as well, and not even just because they’d been set upon by a nest of dragonlings. It seemed like he’d uttered something vaguely portentous at every step, whether it was warning that the ground they walked on was cursed or that the cave they had to enter to find the drakestone was emitting a foul wind that smelt of death. Anders hadn’t smelled anything until they’d had to gut a few giant spiders and gotten liberally splashed with their innards, nor could he hear the cries of the dead slaves that supposedly lingered in the stone of the Bone Pit, but he’d taken Fenris’s word for it. For his part, he’d found it quite nice to get away from the stink and heat of Kirkwall – the breeze coming off the nearby sea had felt almost cool where they stood on the shoulders of Sundermount. 

Even better than fresh air, though, was knowing that Fenris was there solely to help him, for no other reason than that Anders had asked him. He’d also forgotten what it was like to have someone at his back – or in Fenris’s case, charging ahead of him – when giant spiders lurched down from the ceiling or Darktown thieves decided to slash throats instead of purse strings. Looking back, Anders was sure that the moment he’d fallen for Nathaniel was when one of his arrows had burst through the forehead of the Hurlock that had been trying to spit him. Even after everything that had happened since then, he was still a creature of habit – after Fenris had beheaded a dragonling that had been raking Anders with its claws, it had taken everything he’d had not to push the elf against a stalagmite, unlace his leggings, and swallow his cock to the root. As a way of saying thank you, of course, for saving his life. 

“You’ve done enough for me, mage,” Fenris said, “and asked little in return.” He sniffed, the wisps of steam rising off the water wavering around him. “And now you’ve made me smell like a magister’s courtyard in the spring.” 

Anders buried his face against Fenris’s damp neck and inhaled. “It suits you.” 

“I hope it will suit you as well,” Fenris said, rising from the water like a banner of steam himself, sinuous, fluid grace. Anders sat back on his heels and watched him dry himself on a linen sheet. The droplets of water sliding down Fenris’s slender limbs turned to beads of quicksilver when they trickled over his lyrium markings, and Anders felt that little flame of desire that never fully extinguished flare like a beacon fire. He probably _could_ have figured out a spell to cleanse them both of the stench of the sewers, but then he wouldn’t have gotten to watch Fenris bathe, wouldn’t have been able to run his fingers through the elf’s hair or over the slipperiness of his damp skin, wouldn’t have gotten to see him with the linen towel slung around his narrow hips. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen, touched, and tasted every part of Fenris by now, but his thirst for him hadn’t been slaked, that strange curiosity that was never satisfied. 

_Selfish_ , a voice hissed in his head. _Liar_. He jerked his eyes down to the still quivering surface of the bathwater to stare at his own contorted reflection instead of at Fenris, as if he didn’t deserve to look at the elf. And perhaps he didn’t. He didn’t deserve Fenris’s beauty, but even more than that, he wasn’t worthy of his loyalty or his trust. 

_Liar_ , the voice insisted, and Anders felt himself flush. A white lie told to get Fenris naked was nothing in comparison to the lies he had told him about the potion ingredients, which themselves paled before the lies that were to come. Bitterness washed over his tongue even at the thought of it, but he knew there was no other option. _Liar_. He wished the voice were Justice, not just for the familiarity of being dressed down by the spirit, but because it would give him a way out – if he couldn’t lie, he couldn’t go through with their plan, and if he wasn’t going to carry out the plan, he wouldn’t have to lie. But the spirit remained silent, withdrawn as he usually was when Fenris was naked and his lyrium markings were dimmed. 

_I don’t like lying to Fenris_ , he thought, not sure himself if he was addressing that scolding voice or Justice. _It’s wrong. It’s unjust, making him participate in something without his knowledge_. He waited, as if he’d just tossed his baited hook into a pond. 

_Allowing your fellow mages – innocents – to be Annulled is more unjust. This is our duty, our purpose. We cannot be thwarted in it_ , Justice rumbled, sounding uncharacteristically peevish to Anders. 

He sighed. He’d thought Justice was his conscience, since before they had merged, he’d occasionally wondered if he’d had one. Lying had been so much easier for a start – bald-faced lies like telling First Enchanter Irving that he wouldn’t try to run away again or telling the Warden-Commander that he hadn’t burned the corpses at his feet, even as his fingertips still smoked from the spell. But now it seemed that he’d sprouted a fancy new conscience on top of Justice’s moralizing – and it happened to be at odds with the spirit. Somehow, Anders didn’t see his own feelings winning that battle. Fenris was heading for the door, one hand clutching the towel around his waist, the other reaching toward Anders as he passed him. The elf hesitated for a moment, as if trying to decide which part of Anders was clean enough to touch, and he settled on skimming his palm over Anders’s hair. 

“I’m going down to see what we have left in the cellar,” he said. “I think I’ve earned a bottle or three.” 

How odd that Fenris should have fallen so easily into saying “we” and “ours” with regard to the mansion, Anders thought – surely having possessions of his own was a novel idea to Fenris to begin with, as was having companionship… though in many ways, since leaving the Wardens, Anders could have said the same thing about himself. Not that the mansion was Fenris’s any more than it had been Danarius’s, and yet being given a place in it, at Fenris’s table, in his bed, without question seemed to Anders to make up for the elf’s discomfort with being loved. Or, more particularly, being told he was loved. He seemed to trust actions more than words, which was wise, Anders knew, though he himself was usually more word than action. And now Anders was going to betray him with both. 

He pasted a smile on his face as he looked up at Fenris. “I’ll be in soon, love.” 

Fenris gave him a minuscule half-smile in response, one of those minute upward curves of his lips that someone less familiar with him might have mistaken for a cheek twitch, and left in a faint cloud of orange blossom fragrance. When he was gone, Anders slumped down like a puppet with its strings cut, hands fumbling with his filthy clothing. He emptied and refilled the bathtub and heated the clean water with a few spells, feeling decadent for using magic for such a mundane task but not having the energy or the will to pump more water up through the antiquated pipes. If he’d been alone at his clinic, he would have just stripped off and gone to bed, but Fenris wouldn’t have allowed it, and even the cats had turned up their noses at him when he and Fenris had emerged from the cellar tunnel from Darktown. 

He climbed into the tub and sank down into the lukewarm water. Bathing in lukewarm water, not asking Fenris to stay and wash his hair for him, leaving a pebble in his boot all the way up to the Bone Pit. This was how it was going to be, then, he supposed – minor, petty self-inflicted punishments to assuage that guilt that simmered away in him like molten copper in a crucible. As if the final punishment wouldn’t be sufficient – having his heart ripped out, possibly literally and almost certainly metaphorically, by Fenris, knowing that he deserved it, even as he also knew that he had done the right thing. 

_I could tell him_ , he suggested to Justice carefully, gingerly, as if palpating a wound. _I could_ trust _him. I do trust him_. 

_He could betray us_ , was Justice’s quick, curt response, echoing in his head. _He could try to hinder us. I would not wish to have to prevent that. He must not stand in our way._

Anders sighed, watching his breath riffle the water. Perhaps he could discuss it with Orsino, convince him to lay the trap for the templars. _But Fenris will still know whose idea it was_ , he reminded himself, swiping a wet hand over his face. _He’ll know, and he’ll still hate you._

He held his hand, palm down, fingers outstretched above the surface of the water, and studied the droplets collecting at the ends of his fingertips. They looked like the clawed tips of Fenris’s gauntlets that curved past the ends of his fingers, only glass rather than steel. How did Fenris stand the terrible intimacy of killing people with his hands, of reaching inside of them and plucking pieces of them out? Anders had plenty of figurative blood on his hands, buckets of it, but it had always come at a remove – he had never seen the light go out of someone’s eyes by his hand up close. As a healer, of course, he had witnessed death at close quarters more times than he wanted to think about, but he’d never caused those deaths. When his and Justice’s plans came to fruition, would he see that same shuttering in Fenris’s eyes, like a candle flame pinched out between damp fingers? 

But Fenris had survived worse than that already, he told himself. The elf had weathered losing his family and his memory, being tortured by Danarius and Hadriana, having to kill his only friends, being betrayed by his own sister. What was the loss of a possessed mage against all that? A mere paper cut compared to disembowelment. And perhaps he was overestimating Fenris’s attachment to him anyway. Perhaps Fenris just protected him and looked after him out of habit, muscle memory left over from being a slave. He had been Danarius’s bodyguard after all. 

_But I’m all he has_ , Anders thought, guilt and pity brewing into a bitter potion in his gut. _He has no friends, no possibility of a family_. True, Fenris hadn’t seemed to need such things before they’d met, but Anders knew how much more cutting it was to lose something after having had it than to simply never have it at all. 

He could hear Fenris moving around in the room next door, the pad of still-damp bare feet, the clunk and swivel of a bottle on the tabletop, the low rumbling murmur of the elf’s voice as he reprimanded the cats for some feline misdeed. Anders slid down into the water, letting it close over his head, enveloping him in silence and murky light. Yes, losing something after you’d had it was far, far worse. The templars had known that, and he’d thought that he had too. 

_And he’s all_ I _have_ , he thought, the thrum of guilt intensifying, for he knew that Justice would be hurt – if he _could_ be; did spirits even have feelings? – by the thought, not least because for years, he’d considered Justice his only friend. But now, even though he’d been disabused of the idea that Justice was gone, was just another part of him, he had to admit that he no longer considered the spirit a companion, or at least not as often as he considered him a nag, a bully, a scold. _When we go through with this and I’m gone, Fenris is the only one who will remember me._ _Your name will inspire generations!_ Justice thundered in his head, echoing so loudly that Anders pressed the heels of his hands to his temples, as if his head were a bell and he could still its ringing. _You will have changed the world!_

 _But is that even what I want anymore?_ Anders asked, not sure if he wanted or expected a response from Justice, and the spirit obliged him with a faint rumble of disapproval before lapsing back into silence. 

Anders reached out for the Fade, and magic coursed through him, pooling in his fingertips and collecting there just as the water droplets had. He held it there, feeling the hum of it, as if eager to be used. For all of his escaping, chasing after the thread of hope like a kitten trying to pounce on a piece of string, he _had_ thought about killing himself. During his year in the dungeon, he’d sometimes taunted his templar guards more than necessary, hoping that they’d beat him just a little too hard or let him go without food for a bit too long, but as ever the templars had sussed out his dearest wish and refused him it. And after he’d taken Justice into himself, suicide had been out of the question. He pressed his hand against his chest, feeling the ridge of the old scar against the palm, knowing that he could stop his heart with magic – jolt it with electricity, encase it in ice, set it aflame. At the same time, he knew that Justice would prevent him, and it would be just one more thing he had failed at. 

He surfaced, taking a deep gasping breath, magic still flooding through him like the molten cataracts of lava he’d seen in the Deep Roads. Maybe it would burn him up, reduce him to cinders that would drift like sediment to the bottom of the stone tub. As he watched, seams of blue light stitched themselves over his skin, widening into gleaming cracks that branched along his fingers and up his arms until the water glowed pale and milky as moonlight. He felt himself being shunted aside, like a child being sent to his room without supper, confined to that little corner of his own skull that Justice allowed him. 

“Please,” he said out loud, going limp with relief when it came out in his own voice, albeit so small that it barely disturbed the water by his lips. He wasn’t even certain what he was pleading for – the right to kill himself, the right to maintain control over his own body, the right to relinquish the burden he’d taken upon himself at Justice’s insistence? Why did the lives of so many mages – why did _his_ life – require so much pleading for things that were taken for granted by others: freedom, love, life itself? For Kirkwall’s mages, perhaps, he could change that. 

The magic building within him crackled with urgency, and he could feel the itch of it beneath his skin. He cast a few rapid spells, setting the barren hearth aflame, lighting the wall sconces, warming the bathwater until it steamed. 

“Mage? Are you well?” 

Anders jerked upright in the bath at the sound of Fenris’s voice and glanced over his shoulder to find the elf leaning around the doorjamb. From the cant of his shoulders, Anders could tell he was holding his sword in his other hand. 

“Yes, fine. Just got… cold. And dark,” Anders replied, hoping that Fenris assumed the flush in his cheeks was due entirely to the steaming bathwater. 

Fenris raised an eyebrow, a quick upward hitch accompanied by a slight turn of the head that was almost as eloquent a statement of skepticism as his dubious “Hmmm”. “My markings burned with your magic. You must have been _very_ cold.” 

“Colder than the Knight-Commander’s teat,” Anders said, smiling when Fenris let out a snort of laughter. 

“You are falling into dangerous habits, mage,” Fenris said, his face smoothing into seriousness. Anders was tempted to turn away, to sink back into the water and let it flow into his ears to block out the inevitable lecture on the temptations of magic and the decadence of the magisters who cast spells to wipe their own arses when there wasn’t a slave handy to do it for them, but he caught the tiniest, bitten-back hint of a smile quivering at the corner of Fenris’s lips. “Using magic to warm yourself when I am in the next room.” Fenris shook his head, gave a sigh of feigned disappointment, and disappeared around the doorjamb again. 

Anders scrambled out of the bathtub and scrubbed himself dry on a piece of moth-eaten toweling. Maybe none of it would be necessary after all, he told himself, maybe the Divine would deny Meredith’s request, maybe the templars would prove useful for once and protect the Circle mages from the Qunari, maybe… He knew they were groundless hopes, as foolish as a child’s wishes, and even if they _did_ come to pass, his feet had been set on this path the moment he’d accepted Justice into himself. 

Together, they’d chosen the Chantry as their target – for was it not the Grand Cleric who could have put a stop to all of it with a word? The abuses, the imprisonment? – but the Gallows, if all the mages could be conducted to safety, would it not be more symbolic, to bring down the very walls that had cut them off from normal lives? Let the Qunari take the Chantry. They seemed more than willing to do so, especially since several Qunari close to the Viscount had gone missing, and rumor lay the blame at the feet of a templar bearing the seal of the Grand Cleric. 

But these were rushed, half-formed thoughts darting through his head like fish partially glimpsed beneath the surface of the sea. He should have been disgusted with himself for being so easily distracted by Fenris – Justice certainly was – but what Justice deemed a distraction, Anders thought of as a refuge, a respite from the filth and stench of Kirkwall, from the demons that seemed to crowd along the thinned Veil luring mages to succumb to blood magic, from the weight of responsibility that clung to his shoulders, as if each feather on his pauldrons were fashioned from lead. Time seemed to slow when he was with Fenris, stretching as languorously as a cat, making all his other cares recede into the future, even as he felt like it was speeding past, each kiss an eye-blink. It would end in disaster – a mage’s love always would, the templars had taught him that much – but he couldn’t live without it. That was, perhaps, one consolation – once his and Justice’s plan came to fruition, he wouldn’t have to live without Fenris, if only because he was certain the elf would kill him himself. 

That was a worry for another day. He wrapped the towel around himself, let the fire wisps dancing on the hearth and in the wall sconces wink out, and headed for the room where Fenris waited. 

****************

If Anders hadn’t known better, he might have believed that the First Enchanter had rediscovered some long-lost teleportation spell to make the midnight journey across the bay from the Gallows to Hightown without being caught out by the templars. He’d known Orsino first through Karl’s letters, which had described a thoroughly unexceptional mage who had risen to his position by default and had proven to be remarkable only for his passion for improving the lot of the mages in his care. And yet it seemed even _that_ had been mostly ground out of him beneath Meredith’s heel. When they finally met in person, Anders thought he detected some spark of likemindedness, the willingness to work tirelessly for something that was unlikely to yield any results, though he was put-off by the unctuousness of the elf’s voice, as plush as his gold-trimmed First Enchanter’s robes. It was difficult not to see those fine velvet robes as the finery of the prized pet, just as the gilded chains that Danarius had made Fenris wear had been. 

They met in a quiet square in Hightown, in front of another abandoned estate, but far enough away from Fenris’s mansion that anyone waiting at the entrance of the square wouldn’t be able to tell the direction from which they’d come. The First Enchanter was alone, as always, as if he’d been conjured into existence by one of his own spells. Fenris gave him a polite nod before stationing himself at the square’s entrance, leaving Anders to approach Orsino alone. 

“Orsino,” Anders said, trying to keep his voice from carrying too much in the stone courtyard. He never wanted to draw the attention of any passing City Guard or bandits that sometimes ventured into Hightown, but that night, he didn’t want Fenris to hear their conversation either. He caught himself short of casting a barrier around them, knowing Fenris would feel the itch of magic in his markings and assume there was trouble. 

“Serah,” Orsino replied in that voice that would have sounded unbearably pompous to Anders’s ears if not for that all-too-familiar hair-thin thread of exhaustion and sadness running through it. “I am here at your request, though I do not know what service I can provide now that I couldn’t the last three times we met. The Knight-Commander has surely reached Val Royeaux by now. If you are planning to act, it would be best to do it now, when the templars are at their weakest.” 

Orsino’s voice had dipped into a whisper with those last words, and he glanced around, the tiny points of light in his eyes flashing back and forth as he scanned the shadows. Anders tried to keep himself from looking as well – templars always gave themselves away with their clanking armor anyway, “stealth” not being a word in their already limited vocabularies. 

“It’s just a contingency plan for now, Orsino,” Anders said. “For all we know, the Divine has denied Meredith’s request and the templars will protect the mages against the Qunari, should they make an attempt to take the Gallows. But if not….” Justice muttered at the mention of “contingency” – Qunari or no, the spirit was determined to dissolve the Kirkwall Circle, raze it to its foundations so that any kind of rebuilding would be years in the undertaking. “If not, I – _we_ – can make it so the templars who return from Val Royeaux will have nothing left to guard.” 

“But what of the mages?” Orsino asked sharply, and Anders felt a twinge of respect for him. “Whatever your plan, their safety is of paramount importance. I pledged myself to protecting them when I accepted the office of First Enchanter.” 

_Accepted_ , Anders thought, as if it had been offered to him rather than thrown out carelessly to whoever reached out to take it. “There’s a way out of the Gallows,” he replied, wondering how the tunnels could have escaped the First Enchanter’s notice for so many years. Even apprentices knew about them, though few would venture into them without being escorted by someone from the Mage Underground. “We will get them out, slowly and quietly, and then we will spring the trap that you are going to lay.” 

The First Enchanter hesitated. “And if the Divine denies Meredith the Right of Annulment?” he asked. “What becomes of this trap then?” 

Anders shrugged, willing what he hoped was a grin onto his face. It would do no good to spook Orsino now – he might end up confessing all to Meredith as soon as she set foot on the pier at the Gallows. “Then the Gallows might whiff a bit for a while, but otherwise, nothing will happen. I’ll be the one to activate the spell. All you need to do is sprinkle this—” he dipped a hand into his belt pouch and took out the vials full of the foul-smelling potion he’d concocted from the drakestone and _sela petrae_ , “—all over the Gallows, from the dungeon to the towers.” He handed the bottles to Orsino, who made them disappear into his robes as deftly as a pickpocket. “Maybe concentrate some of it under the Knight-Commander’s desk, if you can.” 

“And you can promise me that no mages will be injured by this… scheme of yours?” Orsino asked, one fine brow arching upward on his high forehead. 

“I’m hardly going to do the Knight-Commander’s work for her, am I?” Anders replied. “As long as there is a single living mage left in the Gallows, I will not cast the spell. You have my word.” _Whatever that’s worth._ “Send word when you have used all of this, and I’ll arrange a meeting to give you more.” 

Which meant more lying to Fenris, making up errands for him, sending him off to deliver notes to the First Enchanter’s empty office, because he would never let Anders wander about in Kirkwall on his own with the Qunari around, and yet Anders couldn’t risk him finding out about the potion, the plan, that he’d crawled around in the sewers to collect ingredients not for a ritual to separate Justice from Anders but for a bomb to separate the Gallows from the island on which it sat. Fenris would stop it, but even if he didn’t, it was better, safer, if he didn’t know anything if they were found out. And, selfishly, Anders wanted to hide his betrayal of Fenris’s trust from him as long as he could. It would be as shattered as the mortar and stone of the Gallows when the spell detonated the explosive, but perhaps that would make it easier for him to mourn for Anders. If he mourned him at all. 

“Why are you doing all this?” Orsino asked. He’d seemed satisfied by Anders’s promise, but what was a promise coming from a virtual stranger? “You could just leave Kirkwall, and no one would be the wiser.” 

“Justice.” The word leapt easily to Anders’s lips, though it earned him a questioning glance from the First Enchanter. He swallowed hard, looking down at the ground, trying to banish the image of Karl’s eyes like shallow puddles reflecting an empty sky from his memory. “Kirkwall is merely a symptom of a greater disease. I will never be free as long as my people – _our_ people – are still imprisoned in the Circles and the threat of Tranquility or murder hangs over us simply for being born.” 

Orsino nodded, his head bobbing as if it were too heavy for his slender neck. “I have tried… to bring hope, to make the Circle as much of a life as possible.” His voice dropped to a whisper again, so low that Anders had to lean closer to hear it, though now it seemed choked off, compressed, rather than intentionally quiet. “But it is no life. I know that.” 

“There is no negotiating with the Knight-Commander _or_ the Grand Cleric,” Anders said. “I’ve tried to convince that old biddy for years, and it’s like trying to have a discussion with your deaf grandmother who smiles while you speak but hears nothing and says, ‘That’s nice, dear,’ to everything before patting your head and sending you on your way. And I imagine that trying to reason with Meredith is as pointless as it is terrifying.” 

Orsino let out a snort that Anders took as agreement. “I believe the only words that woman understands are ‘blood’ and ‘magic’.” 

“There can be no peace, Orsino. We have tried peace, and it didn’t work.” Anders glanced upward at the Viddathlok being erected by the Viscount, rising as broad-shouldered and bulky as the Arishok himself over the roofs of Hightown. The dreadnought may have sailed back to Par Vollen, but there was still a gap in the harbor as if all of Kirkwall were expecting its return. The Qunari clearly had no intention of being uprooted. “And I doubt the Qunari will listen to reason any more than the Chantry or the templars.” 

The First Enchanter had followed Anders’s gaze with his own, and now his eyes darted between the gilded towers of the Chantry and the half-finished ones of the Viddathlok. “Why did the Maker give us magic if the only purpose it serves is to make us shunned, hated, and feared?” He sighed and lowered his eyes. “I was born in an alienage, raised Andrastian, but what I have seen, what I have lived has made me question whether there _is_ a Maker.” 

“The oppression of mages stems from the fears of men,” Anders replied, his words treading on the heels of the First Enchanter’s. “They have tried to tell us differently to make us hate ourselves, to make us complicit in our own persecution.” 

“Complicit,” the First Enchanter murmured, as if testing out the word. “Yes.” He seemed distracted, and for a moment, Anders feared that he would call the whole thing off, hand back the bottles of potion, and bugger off back to the Gallows to wait to see who won the race to kill him – the Knight-Commander or the Arishok. 

“I must go,” Anders said, though in truth he had nowhere to be other than the main room at Fenris’s mansion, watching Fenris drink cheap wine that he’d intended to use in making tinctures and then kissing the vinegary taste of it from the elf’s lips. “Remember, send word to me when you have used that up, and I will provide you with more.” Orsino nodded, waving a thin, dismissive hand. “You are doing right thing for the Circle mages, Orsino. For all the mages in Thedas. Don’t forget that.” 

The only response was another distracted nod, so Anders turned to head for the entrance to the square where Fenris waited. He glanced once over his shoulder, expecting Orsino to have dematerialized as mysteriously as he had appeared, but the First Enchanter’s narrow figure was still picked out against the white stonework behind him, head bowed, one hand pressed to his side where he’d hidden the vials of potion as if he had taken a wound. 

Fenris fell into step with him as soon as he exited the square, peeling away from the wall of an estate like an unmoored shadow. 

“It went well,” he said. Asked, Anders supposed, though there was only the slightest upward tilt of a question in the words. 

“I suppose,” Anders replied. “He seems like he is becoming less of a reluctant ally and more of… a regular ally.” He reached out for Fenris’s hand, though holding it was out of the question with those gauntlets, so he settled for wrapping his fingers around Fenris’s wrist and giving it a squeeze, fingertips to pulse point. “For which I mostly have _you_ to thank, love.” 

The deep blue of night hid any blush that might have darkened the elf’s cheeks, but he did let out one of his choked, embarrassed coughs. It seemed that no matter how often Anders complimented him, he still didn’t know how to respond, though Anders had to assume that he had been lavished with praise after he’d become Danarius’s prized possession. Then, he supposed, the praise would have been more for Danarius himself than for Fenris, much as any compliments given to mages sent to perform for the crowned heads of Thedas were directed more toward their templar keepers than the mages themselves. 

He had felt pangs of guilt before at keeping Fenris so much to himself – though who would he tell? It wasn’t as if he had friends in Kirkwall. Before, perhaps, he would have been eager to tell anyone who would listen – Karl had had to warn him against such enthusiasm back at the Ferelden Circle, after Anders had let too much slip to a fellow apprentice. He would have posted a notice on the Chantry noticeboard itself, but the Circle had eventually done its work on him. Now he knew for certain that the people one loved most were the first to be taken away. 

Hightown was quiet, quieter than it used to be before the Qunari sank their roots into the city, though Anders could still hear the murmur of voices and the clink of glasses coming from the estates they passed, windows warm and golden with candlelight. He remembered standing outside those windows on his way back to Darktown from the Rose, staring in at the ladies in their trailing silk gowns and their rouged cheeks, the men puffed up like peacocks in their gaudy velvet doublets. He’d never wished for that life – the nobility were too intertwined with the Chantry, one feeding off the other like a gilded dragon eating its own tail – but before he’d met Justice, he’d longed for fine things, a silk scarf, a pure gold earring, the taste of Agreggio Pavali. Now, when he glanced in the windows, he longed only for normalcy, for the predictability of regular mealtimes, of always having enough firewood, of wearing clothing that wasn’t held together with old bandages and prayers. Of being able to spend time with one’s loved ones without the looming threat of separation. 

His fingers tightened around Fenris’s wrist until the steel edge of the vambrace cut into his palm. From the corner of his eyes, he could see Fenris turn to look at him, a pale moon waxing from half to full, but the elf didn’t try to pry his arm from Anders’s grasp. That burning that had ignited in his breast the night he had found Fenris sitting cross-legged on his rickety old cot back at the clinic flared within him – it seemed sometimes that an entire city was consumed by that fire every night, only to be rebuilt in the ashes of the old the next morning. Perhaps _that_ was the normalcy he sought, the consistency of loving someone that one could depend on seeing every day, someone who would be within reach when one extended one’s arm? _And I can never have that_ , Anders reminded himself. _Even when I think I can, I always ruin it._

He should have made some ridiculously self-sacrificing gesture that would have made Justice proud of him, something even worse than giving up Ser Pounce-a-Lot, because it was _Fenris_ and he was doing it by choice rather than under orders and veiled threats. Turned himself in to the nearest Grey Warden outpost, perhaps. Or become a swabby on one of the pirate ships in the harbor and told Fenris he was married to the sea? But no, he’d been too weak for that, too attached to the one bright spot that life had given him in years. _A desire demon couldn’t have chosen better_ , he thought, which earned him a distant grumble of disgust from Justice. 

Anders had never been one for thinking things through. He’d gotten some practice during his year in solitary confinement, but the skill hadn’t been truly refined until he’d joined with Justice. But in matters that Justice had no interest in, he was left to his own devices, free to sink back into his old bad habits. Living in such a way had been so much simpler when his ability to feel guilt was as under-developed as his ability to plan ahead, but Justice had helped him hone blaming himself to a fine blade he wielded only against himself. 

_I did_ try _to warn him_ , he reminded himself as he jerked Fenris toward him with a tug of his arm. 

“Mage, are you feeling all right?” Fenris asked, before his words were dammed up by Anders’s lips. The elf let himself be shoved back against the ivy-covered wall of some noble’s estate, leaves gone slack in the day’s heat raining down upon their heads. The salty warmth of Fenris’s mouth, the curl of his tongue against Anders’s, seemed to scour away the bitterness of all the lies he’d told Fenris in the past weeks, and Anders wished, as he plunged his fingers into the elf’s hair to pull him closer and deepen the kiss, that the taste of the lies he had yet to tell would be banished as well. 

The talons of Fenris’s gauntlet dug into his muscle of his arse, sharp even through his coat and trousers, and Anders’s groan buffeted against the one that rose from the elf’s throat. Panting, he broke the kiss, leaning back when Fenris craned his neck to continue it. “I am well,” he murmured, and that, at least, wasn’t entirely a lie, now that Fenris’s arms were around him and his erection was nudging Anders’s hip. He dabbed a quick kiss on Fenris’s full lips, gently sucking the lower one between his own. “Perfectly well.” Another kiss, a tiny nip at Fenris’s upper lip that drew a sound from low in the elf’s throat. _Better than I deserve_ , Anders finished in his head, as he ran his tongue over Fenris’s. 

_Maker, let me have this for now, for as long as I can_ , he thought, his hand snaking between them to slip into Fenris’s leggings. He wished he could lose himself in the feel of smooth, slick skin between his fingers, the ragged heat of Fenris’s breath, but at the back of his mind, he could hear a clock begin to tick, winding inexorably down.


	28. Chapter 28

The house was quiet when Fenris returned from his fool’s errand to the Gallows, as quiet as Orsino’s empty office had been when he’d tried to deliver Anders’s note. _Too_ quiet. The slam of the door behind him seemed to be swallowed by that silence, the place becoming so still that he thought he could hear the motes of dust that had been shaken free land on the cracked tile floor. Even his light tread sounded loud to his ears, as if he were stamping up the steps to the main room in a templar’s armored boots rather than on his bare feet.

“Mage?” he called and was answered only by the echo of his own voice and the usual groans and wheezes of the decaying mansion. 

When he reached the main room, no frenzied scratch of a quill on parchment greeted him at the threshold, no saccharine infantile cooing at the cats lilted to his ears to make him bite back a smile. For the second time in as many hours, Fenris found a deserted room, ink well stoppered, papers arranged as neatly as they could be. He walked a few steps further into the room, unstrapping his sword from his back and laying it on the table. The hearth was cold and barren, but that was to be expected with summer heat still smothering the city. No telltale imprint dented the seats of the armchairs; the bed was as close to made as it ever got. _He wouldn’t have gone out without telling me_ , Fenris thought. _It’s far too dangerous, and where is there for him to go?_

He peeked into the room where they bathed and found it empty as well. Anders would have had no reason to go into the other abandoned bedrooms on that floor, which were full of nothing but broken furniture, armoires crammed with slowly rotting silks, and chests that had long since been pilfered, but Fenris checked them too. Other than Soporatus curled up asleep on a pile of moth-gnawed velvet robes in the bottom of one of the wardrobes, they were empty. 

A bubble of fear burst within him, sending panic shooting through his limbs and propelling him along the corridor to the privy – empty – and up the stairs to the tower room. Perhaps Anders had gone up there to keep an eye out for him. He had before, after all. But that room was deserted as well, but for the curtains billowing with the hot, humid wind and the faint imprint their bodies had left in the dust on the floor all those months ago. Fenris was careful not to disturb the mark, its edges already blurred by their movements on that long-ago night, the negative space they’d created that made it impossible to tell when Anders ended and Fenris began. 

“Mage?!” he called again, rougher now, with a pale shade of the same fear and anger in his voice as when he’d first come to this mansion in search of Danarius. Over the pounding of the blood in his ears, his voice sounded soft, muffled, as if he were hearing it from underwater. “Are you here? Anders!” 

Only stillness and silence heavy enough to brush against him like the touch of unwanted fingers, but for the huff of his breath through his nostrils. He activated his markings, letting the burn of them distract him from the terror that was brewing inside him. Perhaps the lyrium would catch Justice’s attention, if Anders and his spirit were somewhere in the house. 

Images of Anders with the blazing sun of the Chantry branded on his pale forehead propelled Fenris down the stairs like a gale filling the sails of a ship. Why would he have left? There was food in the pantry, which Fenris often had to remind him to eat; the clinic had been shuttered since the templars had raided it; he had no friends in Kirkwall other than Fenris – though _friend_ seemed somehow insufficient a descriptor – and he hadn’t even told his former clinic helpers where he’d gone in case they accidentally betrayed him to the Qunari or the templars. Adrenaline gushed through him; he felt the splinters of the wooden staircase stabbing his feet as little as he’d felt the thorns and branches of the undergrowth of the Seheron jungle when he’d run from the freshly bloodied bodies of the Fog Warriors and their accusatory, death-glazed eyes. 

That was the only loss he could remember experiencing until now, a loss that had at once been his fault and not. Now, after seeing Varania, he could recall being separated from his family, but that had been mitigated by his belief that he was improving their lives by buying their freedom. How did people survive this pall of dread? How did they tell themselves that perhaps there was nothing to fear after all? Fenris felt as if he were leashed and chained again and was being tugged along by someone stronger than himself. 

He dashed into the room where they slept and gathered up his sword, doubling his arms behind him to strap it on even as he hurried out the door. His fingers were clumsy, numb as his feet had been, as if all of his energy were consolidating itself on finding Anders and couldn’t be spared for any smaller tasks. 

He was still struggling with his sword as he bounded down the stairs… and barreled directly into Anders. 

“ _Fasta vass_ , mage! Where were you?” he demanded, catching himself on the banister as his knees threatened to crumble beneath him with relief. He blinked a few times to clear the fog that had descended in front of his eyes and looked up at Anders, taking in the red flush on the mage’s cheeks, the flutter of his feathered pauldrons with his panting breath. 

“I was… down in the cellar,” Anders replied, and he _sounded_ out of breath as well. “I was making a tincture and needed some wine for it.” 

“And yet you have no wine,” Fenris said, flattening any emotion from his voice. He didn’t want the mage to see his fear, didn’t want to hear his glib comments on the frenzy it had sent Fenris into. 

“Didn’t have the sort I needed,” Anders answered, almost too quickly, his voice smoother now. “I suspect _someone_ drank it all.” 

“I suspect that whoever drank it was driven to do so by an insufferable mage,” Fenris said. He headed back up the stairs to the living area, his legs still wobbly as a colt’s beneath him. Anders gave a little snicker of a laugh behind him, and after a moment, the stairs creaked with the tread of his boots. 

“What news from Orsino?” he asked, his voice oddly light and off-hand, as if the First Enchanter were a casual social acquaintance he was only asking after out of politeness. 

“We might have to drag the bay for his corpse at this point,” Fenris said, slinging his sword off his shoulder once more and dropping it on one of the armchairs. “He was nowhere to be found. Again.” Knight-Captain Cullen had been absent too, though that was less rare of an occurrence. Fenris had found himself enjoying his brief conversations with the templar. He had been able to tease out threads of Cullen’s story when the man let them slip and was slowly knitting them into a coherent narrative that was not entirely unlike his own life. 

Anders sank into the other armchair, slouching down as if completely at his leisure, one leg thrown over the arm. Fenris glared at him – his own legs kept carrying him back and forth along the length of the room, as if he could somehow soothe his jangling nerves by exhausting himself. 

He could feel Anders’s eyes tracking him as he paced, and a quick glance at the mage found the tiniest curl of a smile at the corners of his lips, though it could have been a trick of the afternoon light slanting in the window. 

“Are you all right, Fenris?” Anders asked, and his voice was soaked with amusement like a cake drenched in rum and honey. “Has one of the cats given you fleas? You seem… agitated. I’m sure I have a salve for that.” 

Fenris skidded to a stop, sending up tiny whirlwinds of dust from the time-worn rug. “Why didn’t you answer when I called for you?” he demanded. He looked into Anders’s eyes, imagining the tiny playful gleam scrubbed away like a pencil mark, replaced by the mirror-like blankness of a Tranquil’s gaze or the flat, affectless stare of someone dosed with _qamek_. Fear stirred again in him, and he shifted from foot to foot, trying to resist the urge to take up his pacing once more. 

“I thought…” He jerked his eyes away from Anders’s, swallowing the words back down. The mage wouldn’t have used it against him, wouldn’t have taken himself away just to punish Fenris – he knew Anders had known that same fear too well to use it against someone else – so why couldn’t he say it? It wasn’t as if his words were a spell and speaking them would cast some sort of magic, summon his worst fears across the Veil and into the world. 

“I was a Grey Warden, Fenris. I’m used to dank underground places, so I think I can manage the wine cellar,” Anders said, but the teasing tone in his voice sounded false, too bright, like the paste gemstones the Laetans had worn in Minrathous when they tried to mix with the Altus. “Unless you’ve been hiding a Broodmother down there.” He grimaced and gave a shiver that seemed only half theatrical. 

“I’m not hiding anything,” Fenris protested, and Anders flinched as if slapped, eyelashes fluttering like tawny moth’s wings. “And that is not what I meant.” 

He unfastened his gauntlets and tossed them onto the tabletop, thankful for something to do with his hands and nearly as thankful when one of them knocked Anders’s stacked manifesto to the floor in a deluge of parchment. The corners of Anders’s eyes tightened minutely at the _whoosh_ the pages made as they cascaded to the carpet, but he made no comment. Fenris swallowed, trying to clear the painful tightness that had gripped his throat, and shoved his fingers through his hair. He thought he saw Anders’s own fingers twitch as he did it, as if in envy. 

“What use am I to you if I can’t even protect you?” They were not the words he’d expected, and he pressed his lips together to keep any more from tumbling out, as loose and jumbled as the manifesto pages that now scattered the floor. 

Anders’s eyes narrowed, twin lanterns with the shutters half-lowered. “Of all the ridiculous…” he began half under his breath, before trailing off, giving his head a shake as if in disbelief. “You don’t have to be _of use_ to me at all, Fenris,” he spat. “I appreciate your help. I am indebted to you for it. I _love_ you for it, among other things. But if you decided tomorrow that all you wanted to do was drink wine and sleep in a sunbeam like a cat, I would still need you.” He brushed his fingertips over his forehead, a quick flick of his hand, as if to swipe away some of his exasperation, though his all-too-familiar exhaustion immediately took its place. “Not what you can do. _You_.” 

How was one different from the other? And yet, he certainly didn’t value Anders solely for what he could do, for Fenris himself or for anyone else. If anything, he cared for Anders in spite of that. He had to own that magic had proven useful for healing, but otherwise, he abhorred what Anders could do, or at least what he had the potential to do. But he could never have told Anders that he loved him in spite of his magic, Anders whose magic had shaped so much of who he was and what he did, Anders who cast his spells as easily and naturally as Fenris thrust and parried with his sword. He wondered how he would feel if someone had loved him despite his markings, though he had to admit it was at once the same and different – he had not been born with them, and yet he had once wanted them; they had made him the man he was, and yet they pained him daily and marked him clearly as different. Were they now part of him the way Anders’s magic was of him? Or would they always be separate, alien, unhealing wounds his body tried to reject? 

Fenris turned away, bowing his head to hide the heat he could feel flaming in his cheeks, and unstrapped his breastplate. He expected to hear the protesting squeal of the old chair as Anders stood, the creak of floorboards under his weight as he walked over to Fenris, expected to feel the mage’s lips on the nape of his neck. But instead an expectant silence reigned, though it was an expectation that Fenris didn’t understand. He had nothing to apologize for certainly, no other explanations to offer. What could the mage want? Orders, as much as he would have resented them, would at least have been clear, if only in how to leave them unfulfilled. 

He unbuckled his belt and slid it deliberately from his hips, setting it in a coil on the table beside his gauntlets and breastplate. For a moment, he stared down at the pieces of armor, feeling as if he had somehow disappeared and left them behind. Were those intricate spikes and curves of metal what he could _do_ , or were they who he _was_? He had worn them for so long – even sleeping in them for a time – that he was no longer sure. Or had they been a complete renunciation of who he’d been as a slave – bare, clothed only in chains and the perfumed oils that Danarius preferred? 

With one finger, he nudged the empty shell of his breastplate, watched it rock back and forth like a beetle knocked onto its back, and wondered if he were somehow molting, shedding a hard carapace that no longer fit him. He remembered the cicadas that shrieked all summer in his master’s courtyard, how he’d sometimes found their empty husks still clinging to the tree branches as if waiting for the insect to return. No matter how hard he’d tried, racing from the slave quarters to the orchard as soon as he’d finished his chores, he’d never caught the moment where the creature shucked off its too-small skin, never saw the tender, vulnerable insect emerge to leave its outgrown self behind. He supposed the world must have hardened the newly molted cicadas too. Now, after receiving his markings, he understood that rawness, though he’d been left with seams in his skin that had never quite healed, that burned with the wrong movement, that itched in the presence of magic. He’d tried to compensate for it by armoring himself mentally and physically, and yet Anders – a mage of all people – had still found a way in. 

As he stared at the shift of the reddening afternoon light from the windows on his breastplate, he could feel Anders’s gaze running up and down his spine like a finger being dragged along his backbone. But when he dared a glance over his shoulder, Anders wasn’t looking at him at all – his broad forehead was still cradled in his hand, his splayed fingers hiding his eyes. Unbidden, the brand of Tranquility appeared on the mage’s forehead to Fenris’s eyes, like an after-image seen behind one’s eyelids after staring at the noonday sun. He scrubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands to banish the image. Fenris had often stayed up, unable to sleep in the candlelight that Anders preferred, and let his markings flare, dragging his fingertip over the mage’s skin. Anders never woke, and there was never any resistance to his touch – he phased his bare finger just beneath the surface of Anders’s pale skin and drew a copy of his own markings into it, the thicket of thorns on the biceps, the branching curves and spots on torso and thighs. There was never any sense of intimacy when he killed with his hands – for which he was thankful – just the slimy kiss of viscera, the scrape of bone, the cling of muscle and organs. With Anders, it was different, as if he were marking him, making them somehow the same. 

There had been nights, alone in his cramped cell in Danarius’s villa, nights when the magister had no use for him and Hadriana had found another poor soul to torment, when he’d wondered about his markings – if he left anything of himself behind when he phased his fist into another’s flesh, if they truly were connected to the Fade as Danarius had said, if by reaching into someone’s skull he could somehow see into their minds. After all, he was able to feel their hearts, smooth as satin pillows or flabby as a poorly cooked loin of pork, feel them flutter in his palm, feel the faint throb of the blood through the embroidery of vessels. But if he’d thought to see anything of Anders’s years at the Ferelden Circle in the mind of his former lover, he would have been disappointed, for when he’d slipped his finger into Karl’s skull, all he’d seen was the emptiness in the man’s eyes, with a gleam of sadness that grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared like a ship over the horizon. 

He walked over to the chair where Anders sat, and even the soft slap of Fenris’s bare feet on the floorboards must have been loud enough to startle the mage from his reverie, for he raised his head and looked up, eyes wide. Fenris brushed the strands of golden hair from his forehead and then pressed his thumb gently against the center of it, right where the brand of Tranquility would be stamped. 

“Do you understand why I worry?” he asked, and the silence that answered him was like a caught breath, so complete that he thought he could hear the heartbeat that made the hair that had already fallen back across Anders’s forehead minutely tremble against his fingers. 

Then Anders made a sound like a sob choked in his throat, and in a rustle of feathers and a creak of ancient furniture, he dove forward and slung his arms around Fenris’s waist, pressing his cheek against the front of his tunic so hard that Fenris could feel the faint prickle of his stubble through the fabric. Fenris stood there, unsure of what he was meant to do – did the mage want to be comforted? But for what? Was he simply overwhelmed with gratitude that Fenris cared for his well-being? That, at least, Fenris could understand. 

“You frightened me,” he admitted, grudgingly, as if the words were being reeled out of him like fish on a line. He didn’t touch Anders, his hands hovering uselessly above the mage’s feathered pauldrons, first out of uncertainty but now because he didn’t trust himself – he subtly tilted his hips away from Anders, whose proximity seemed to be confounding both Fenris’s body and his mind. 

Anders’s sharp chin dug into his stomach as the mage turned his head to look up at him. Fenris darted a quick glance down and just as quickly looked away, cheeks burning. The expected teasing – no, _smug_ – gleam had flared back into Anders’s eyes. 

“You, frightened? I can’t think of a word that suits you less, other than maybe ‘cuddly’.” As he spoke, Anders slid his hands over Fenris’s arse, fingers kneading the muscle. 

Fenris cleared his throat, willing his voice to be even. “Before you came up from the cellar, there was a moment when I…” He squeezed his eyes shut only to find the image of Anders with the sun brand blazing on his forehead waiting behind his eyelids once more. “Don’t do that again.” 

He looked down and saw seriousness settle over Anders’s face like frost. A flurry of panic churned in his stomach – Anders didn’t like being told what to do, and his spirit no doubt liked it even less – but as he watched, something else seemed to seep into that grave look like tea diffusing into hot water. Could it have been regret? Guilt? Before he could place it, Anders lowered his head again, pressing his forehead against Fenris’s stomach, and sighed. His breath was warm and humid through the linen of Fenris’s tunic, seeming to condense on the skin beneath as if he were made of glass or cold steel, and then his fingers were fumbling with the laces of Fenris’s leggings, as clumsily as if they were frostbitten. 

Fenris was hard by the time Anders had unlaced him and shoved his leggings down over his hips, and he pushed himself eagerly into the warmth of the mage’s mouth. Anders responded in kind – usually careful to the point of being hesitant or so slow and patient that it seemed he enjoyed sucking Fenris’s cock as much as Fenris enjoyed having it sucked, he now seemed desperate, rushed, messy, sinking Fenris into his mouth to the root in one stroke. One of his hands was still splayed over Fenris’s arse cheek, clutching at it as if trying to pull Fenris even deeper into his mouth, and the other slid over Fenris’s hip to wrap around his erection. Anders was shaking, the rhythm between his mouth and his stroking hand uneven, and he flinched when Fenris combed his fingers through his hair, his teeth grazing the underside of Fenris’s cock. 

“Mage, I….” Fenris swallowed, a hard, almost painful gulp, as Anders flicked the tip of his tongue over the skin his teeth had scraped. “We don’t have to… I _want_ to, but….” Want was something he had tried so hard to learn to express, and yet still words failed him. He could _show_ Anders what he wanted, concealing it in the guise of hoping to please Anders rather than himself. It didn’t help that so much of what he’d learn to want – what Anders had taught him to want – had once been torment for him. 

He felt himself beginning to wilt, in spite of that want and in spite of his fear of displeasing Anders. He still hated himself for having that fear, for even thinking of it, though he could at least tell himself now that it was a fear of disappointing someone he _wanted_ to please rather than someone he _had_ to please. 

Anders had pulled away when he’d spoken, and Fenris reached down to cup his chin in his hand, tilting his head up. The mage let himself be drawn to his feet by that gentle grasp, though he kept his eyelids lowered, watching his own hand as it stroked Fenris’s cock, the deep gold of his eyelashes seeming dark against his pale cheeks. Fenris tipped his head up just enough to brush his lips over Anders’s, the briefest, softest contact, both test and invitation. 

On the second pass of his lips, he felt Anders tremble, and then the mage reached up to cup Fenris’s face in his hands, leaving a damp streak of spit and pre-come over his cheek as he pushed his fingers into Fenris’s hair to pull him closer, deepening the kiss. Out of habit, Fenris reached up to wipe it away – _Master doesn’t like it when his pet is stained with his own mess_ – but Anders’s lips left his and pressed a wet chain of kisses along his cheekbone, blotting away the moisture his fingers had left behind. Fenris’s breath caught in his throat, a tiny gasp that barely riffled the strands of hair at Anders’s temple. Instead of dropping his hand back uselessly to his side, he pressed it against the one cradling his cheek, turning his head enough to wrap his lips around the tip of Anders’s thumb and swirling his tongue over it. 

“Maker, Fenris,” Anders groaned, a small, broken sound as if his usually adept tongue had completely forgotten how to form words. He leaned forward to rest his forehead against Fenris’s, his warm breath buffeting Fenris’s face, as rapid and frayed as if he’d been running with templars on his heels. “I don’t deserve you,” he murmured, the words running together, a muddy undercurrent in the stream of his breath. “I’ve never done anything to—” 

A strange violence surged inside of Fenris, not directed toward Anders, but toward his words, toward the echo they stirred in Fenris himself. Indignation at Anders’s willful blindness toward himself swelled, dredging up with it frustration at never being able to change the mage’s mind, at not having the eloquence to convince him but also knowing in such cases that words were futile. And yet there was no mirror he could hold up to Anders’s eyes to show him how others saw him, how the Fereldan refugees in Darktown saw him, how Fenris himself saw him. 

And carried along in this maelstrom was a long-ignored anger at himself for letting himself care for a mage, care so deeply that he would want Anders to see his goodness – a goodness Fenris would not have believed in a year earlier. That he should choose to live with a mage, share a bed with a mage and sleep in as much comfort as possible between Anders’s nightmares of the Archdemon and the pain of his own markings and the memories that hung in the cobwebs of his mind like venomous spiders – it should have been impossible. Perhaps he’d been happier when he believed it to be impossible, when the world had been easier to divide up into those who should be feared and those who should not. But most confounding of all was that he should _trust_ a mage. 

He let Anders’s thumb slide from between his lips and kissed him, tasting the lyrium on his breath and thinking of it branching through Anders’s body until he looked like Fenris himself, just on the inside. With fingers now almost as practiced at the task as they were at removing his own armor, he unfastened Anders’s coat and slid it off his shoulders, letting his palms run over the ridges of his clavicle, the knobs of his shoulders. Anders’s tunic – so thin with wear and washings that Fenris could see the pink of his skin through it – he tugged over the mage’s head, Anders breaking their kiss just long enough to raise his arms so Fenris could slip it off of him. He tore open the laces of Anders’s trousers and pushed them down his thighs, only to remember the blighted boots that humans insisted on wearing, and he stooped to curse and fumble with the intricate buckles on them. Where had a mage who lived in the sewers and relied on the limited kindness of others for his livelihood come by such convoluted footwear? That he was distracted by Anders’s long, pale thighs, flocked with thread-of-gold hair, and the thick, flushed curve of his erection was no excuse, though it was difficult to see what his hands were doing when he was busy following the pulse in the mage’s thigh up to his groin with a trail of kisses. 

Finally the boots were unbuckled, and Anders helpfully lifted each foot so Fenris could pull them off and toss them aside before tugging his trousers the rest of the way off, though the mage was so thin that they seemed to slide off without their laces and the boots holding them in check. He nudged his face between Anders’s newly bared thighs, inhaling the salt odor of his skin, the oddly spicy scent of the crisp, dark gold hair at the base of his cock, and ran his tongue over the soft, tightening skin of Anders’s balls. The mage let out a quiet moan, his knees sagging as if he were about to sit back down in the armchair he’d recently vacated. 

Fenris wriggled the rest of way out of his leggings as he dragged his tongue along the mage’s erection, tearing the thin straps of his tunic so he could shrug it off rather than pulling it over his head. He curled his hand around his own half-hard cock, giving it a few quick jerks, more out of a strange need to keep his hands busy so they couldn’t run over every inch of Anders’s bared flesh than a need for stimulation. He heard a murmured curse and glanced up to find the mage watching him, eyes glazed over with bliss. 

“Andraste’s dimpled arse, Fenris,” Anders breathed. “I could watch you forever and go to the Maker’s side a happy man, but wouldn’t you rather I….” 

He trailed off as Fenris scrambled to his feet and grabbed his wrist, guiding him toward the bed. The mage was all but treading on his heels, his erection pushing slick and warm against Fenris’s arse cheek, but when they reached the bed, Anders lay down on the lumpy mattress before Fenris could forestall him, his face pressed against the blanket. There was something oddly submissive about the pose, coupled with the faint shine of the white scars crisscrossing the mage’s back. Fenris had had Anders many times, but it had never seemed like this, like a capitulation, something given rather than shared. 

Fenris stretched out beside him on the bed, a quick kiss of skin on skin, before rolling onto his side, presenting the mage with his back. He could feel Anders’s breath quivering on the back of his neck, a slight catch in it, as if he were hesitating. A shy finger ran down the shallow canal of his spine, but other than that, Anders didn’t touch him. Fenris felt as if he were something precious – a sculpture cast in gold or a vase of the thinnest Orlesian porcelain – that Anders couldn’t believe had been given to him. The idea of _belonging_ to someone else made his stomach twist as if it were being wrung out, but surely if he were the one doing the giving…? Wasn’t that what this was – choosing what to do, whom to love, whom to belong to? Wasn’t that what Anders had told him life was? 

He reached behind him blindly, groping in the air until his hand settled on the sharp apex of Anders’s hip. Sliding his hand down to cup the mage’s arse, he gathered him closer, arching his back to push his hips toward Anders. 

“Cast your spell, mage.” 

Anders’s breath stuttered against the back of his neck, and he could hear the mage making tiny, choked half-words, as if he were second-guessing what he wanted to say when the words were already on their way out of his mouth. Without glancing over his shoulder, he knew Anders was blushing too, could feel the heat radiating from his cheeks on the nape of his neck. 

“Are you sure?” Anders finally got out, though his voice sounded as thin as blood flow cut off by a tourniquet. “Maker knows I want to, but…” Fenris heard him swallow with a thick gulp, and when Anders spoke again, his voice was even smaller than before. “…do _you_ want to?” 

“Would I be asking if I didn’t?” Fenris asked, trying to smooth some of the sharpness from his tone, the tightness born of the urgency of arousal and the impatience of knowing that he might lose his nerve. And fear, he unwillingly admitted to himself. Fear of pain, of course, which was natural, but worse, fear of memories – for too long the only memories he had – of Danarius, lumbering through his mind on spindly limbs like Terror Demons. 

He felt the curl of Anders’s smile against his shoulder, heard the tinge of warmth that brightened the apprehension in the mage’s voice. “You’ve got me there, love.” After a moment filled with the faintest dabs of Anders’s lips along his shoulders and between his shoulder blades, the mage’s fingers closed around Fenris’s hip with the same reverent hesitation as before, and Fenris willed himself not to flinch. He _did_ want this. He longed for Anders, all of him, in every way. 

The chill of Anders’s magic tugged at his markings, and then a warm slickness coated his arse and inner thighs, tickling as it trickled slowly over his skin and onto the blanket beneath him. The head of Anders’s cock brushed against the cleft of his arse, and Fenris couldn’t keep himself from stiffening, muscles going rigid as if trying to decide between fighting and fleeing. But instead of trying to push into him, Anders just slid the length of his cock between Fenris’s grease-slicked arse cheeks, his hand releasing Fenris’s hips to wrap around his erection and give it a few slow, gentle strokes until Fenris relaxed against him once more. 

Frustration warred with pleasure in him – the closeness of Anders, the silky graze of his cock against his arse, the coaxing hand stroking him, all of it made his desire for the mage rise into a gnawing hunger so desperate it bordered on a physical need, and yet he couldn’t make himself urge Anders on. 

The mage was pushing his cock between Fenris’s thighs now, the head of it nudging his balls. He tightened the muscles of his thighs, smiling when Anders buried his face between his shoulder blades and moaned, the hand on Fenris’s cock becoming more erratic in its rhythm. Bringing Anders off now would make the decision whether or not to go on for him… or, considering the mage’s Grey Warden _gifts_ , briefly delay it, but he gave Anders one more squeeze before pushing his hips back against him more insistently. 

He swallowed down a groan of protest when Anders’s hand left his cock and slid over his hip to his arse, fingertips trailing along the cleft of it, lightly circling his entrance. The mage’s other arm had snaked behind Fenris’s head and over his shoulder, nesting them together more tightly, and with the same ambivalence that seemed to be tainting all of his reactions, Fenris couldn’t decide if he felt protected or trapped by the cage of the embrace. 

One of Anders’s long, slender fingers pushed inside him, and Fenris clenched against it, breath searing his lungs as he held it. He felt Anders shift behind him, and then the mage’s lips were on his cheek, kissing along his cheekbone, over his ear, down to the knotted corner of his jaw. Anders’s other hand was flattened out on Fenris’s chest, fingers following the gentle curve of the muscle, their tips just brushing his nipple. He knew the mage must be able to feel the rapid, stampeding tattoo of his heartbeat beneath his palm, and for a moment, Anders collected Fenris against him, making a cradle of his body to rock him in. 

Fenris felt the heat in his cheeks flare – he didn’t want this, this coddling, and on some level, he hated himself for being comforted by it. It was too much of a reminder of his past that he needed it, a reminder that he would always be Danarius’s creature to some extent, since the man had shaped his life and experiences like a sculptor, always chiseling away, only it had not been just beauty that the magister had sought in his creation. While his handiwork had been intended to yield surpassing beauty on the outside, all silver-filigreed limbs and lithe muscle, it had equally sought to mold a being that was entirely dependent on its master, a limbless, spineless thing that knew only fear and supreme loyalty. 

Then Anders arched the finger that was inside him, and all thought of Danarius was torn apart as easily as gauze and trampled on as a jolt of ecstasy shook him. His toes curled, feet scrabbling against Anders’s shins, and his cock stiffened almost painfully, a thread of pre-come seeping from it and leaving a silvery trail on the blanket. He was tempted to simply roll onto his stomach, pulling the mage with him, and let Anders fuck him into the mattress, if only to get the friction of the threadbare damask of the coverlet against his aching erection. 

The burn of his markings was only a momentary distraction as Anders cast another spell and the now-familiar minuscule bolts of lightning rained from his fingertips, forming a glittering purple-blue path of electricity from Fenris’s nipple and down his stomach, edging ever closer to his cock. He tasted the ferrous tang of blood on his tongue as he bit down on his lip to hold back his groans. Perhaps he seemed adequately distracted by the electricity, because Anders slid another finger into him, crooking both of them. There was a brief pinch of pain as old, stiff scar tissue stretched, and Fenris’s breath whistled through his gritted teeth. 

And then the mage’s fingers were sliding out of him, and he could feel the tension in Anders’s limbs, as if he were considering how to disentangle himself from around Fenris. He turned his head to cast a questioning glance over his shoulder at Anders, but the mage had his head bowed, pink-stained cheeks half-hidden behind a fall of autumn-gold hair. 

“I don’t want to hurt you, Fenris,” he murmured, the words soft, percussive beats of breath on Fenris’s shoulder. “Maker knows you can take pain, but I don’t want to….” He trailed off and pressed his lips into the indent of Fenris’s shoulder muscle, flicking his eyes up to give him a brief, sheepish look. “You’ve already given me more than I had any right to expect or hope for.” 

“ _Venhedis_ ,” Fenris muttered and reached behind him, running his hand along Anders’s flank until it reached his hip and then sliding down to his groin to grasp his erection. The mage was still hard, his cock slippery with a mixture of grease from his spell and his own pre-come, and he let out a shuddering gasp as Fenris’s fingers wrapped around him. He didn’t protest as Fenris pushed his hips back, guiding Anders toward his entrance. 

Anders, seeming to understand that for once his self-sacrificing ways wouldn’t be appreciated, gripped Fenris’s hip and slowly – _maddeningly_ slowly – pushed the head of his cock into him. Fenris schooled himself to stillness, not willing to give the mage any excuses to pull away, even though pressure had quickly turned to pain as his body stretched around Anders’s cock. It was a strange waxing and waning, a shifting tide of pleasure, fullness, and pain, whereas before it had always been pain, simple and straightforward. Anders slid another few inches in, and the vague discomfort his body had settled into sharpened back into pain – the mage was bigger than… He pushed the thought away before he could complete it, before the sketch of those terrible nights could be more fully shaded in by his memory. Burying his face into the musty-smelling pillow, he took the corner of it between his teeth and bit down until the threads snapped. 

Pain and ecstasy fought a slow battle until Anders had sunk into him completely, his balls a soft weight against Fenris’s arse. The nagging irritation of his markings, set itching by Anders’s magic, was a welcome distraction, and though the mage’s healing spells couldn’t fix the burn and pressure inside of him, his electricity spell brushed all along Fenris’s limbs and over his cock, sweet as a lover’s sighs. He felt Anders pause – catch his quivering breath, try to still the shivering of muscles knotted almost to cramping with the strain of holding back – and heard the damp slide of his tongue over his lips. 

“Mage,” Fenris said, hearing an echo of that strain in his own voice, “Andraste herself will have come back by the time we’ve finished if you don’t get a move on.” 

Anders’s yelp of laughter stirred the hair sticking to the sweat on Fenris’s temple, and then the mage rocked his hips against Fenris, gentle, shallow thrusts that grazed the spot inside of him that Anders’s fingers had been caressing. Fenris squeezed his eyes shut, as if the sight of the evening sky, fleecy with golden-pink clouds, through the window were too much to process on top of the pleasure rampaging through him. _So this is one more thing that was taken from me_ , he thought, settling his hand on Anders’s arse to draw him deeper, feeling the muscle of it clench with his thrusts. Even after fucking Anders until the mage was groaning insensibly and spending himself without his cock ever being touched, Fenris still couldn’t quite believe that it was possible to enjoy this. But now…. Now his own throat felt seared by his harsh cries, now he felt a pressure building at the base of his cock like a charge set in a mine, a fuse being burned away until it exploded. He turned his face blindly toward the sound of Anders’s labored breath and somehow found his lips, curling his tongue into the mage’s mouth. 

Anders was trying to pace himself, he could tell – every flurry of thrusts would be followed by the mage stilling against him, sunk into him as far as he could go, his arms wrapping around Fenris and holding him so tightly that Fenris could feel the tumult of Anders’s heartbeat radiate through his own ribcage. He should have felt trapped in the chains of the mage’s arms; he should have wanted to shrug him off, wrench himself free. But instead he felt… not protected, exactly, but as though he were carrying Anders on his back to safety, to freedom, the man’s weight welcome, the warmth of his body reassuring. 

Fenris squeezed Anders inside of him, and Anders moaned into his mouth before breaking the kiss. His lips ran along the side of Fenris’s throat as his hand slipped from his hip to the back of his thigh. Grasping his hamstring, he lifted Fenris’s leg, opening him wider to his thrusts, which were harder now, making the bed squeal in protest beneath them and shake until Fenris thought it would collapse into kindling. Anders raised himself onto one elbow and bowed his head over Fenris, eyes always downcast, as if trying to avoid Fenris’s gaze. The mage’s lips found his nipple and wrapped around it, the tip of his tongue flicking the flat top of it until Fenris arched against him. It was too much. He wished Anders would touch his cock, to free him from the overwhelming sensations that rolled over him, like wave after wave of cavalry marching through him. At the same time, he wanted it to go on until his muscles were weak as water, wrung out until he couldn’t hold himself upright and all he could do was collapse onto the sweat-soaked mattress. 

“I can’t, Fenris, _Maker_ ….” Anders’s words were swallowed by a throaty moan that nearly made Fenris come right then. The mage pressed his damp forehead against his shoulder as he buried his cock into Fenris’s arse and shuddered against him. Fenris could feel Anders’s cock twitch inside him, seeming to pulse along with the pounding of their hearts. A twinge of disappointment twisted his stomach – would Anders pull away now, severing the closeness between them? He thought of the mage’s barrier spells when they were in battle, always enveloping both of them, tying their fates together, and how he always felt strangely lonely when Anders dropped them again. But, selfishly, he needed there to be some outlet for the pleasure that was overtaking him, filling him to the point of a helpless sort of pain. He remembered a fire that had swept through Danarius’s laboratory, how the glass flasks burst from heat without ever being touched by the flames, their contents boiling, and that was how he felt now – as if he would shatter into shards at the slightest increase in stimulation. 

But Anders’s Grey Warden stamina didn’t fail him, and he kept pushing into Fenris, curving his hips upward as he thrust. It felt different now, softer, slipperier – Fenris could feel Anders’s come seeping out of him with each thrust, leaving his arse and upper thighs tacky with it, but the mage’s erection scarcely seemed to have dwindled. Fenris’s thigh, slick with sweat, slipped out of Anders’s grip, and rather than grabbing hold of it again, Anders – as if he’d heard Fenris’s thoughts – wrapped his fingers around his cock, stroking it to match the rhythm of his thrusting hips. Fenris fucked the tight ring of the mage’s fingers, slick with his own pre-come, snapping his hips up to meet each stroke of Anders’s hand. His own fingers dug into the mage’s arse cheek, nails opening up cuts in the pale flesh, and he came with a ragged cry, his come gushing into Anders’s fist, leaking from between his fingers and onto the blanket. 

For a fleeting moment, he remembered everything and nothing at all, a barrage of images and names and voices that smeared and blurred together as they rushed through his mind. And then it was as if he were waking up on the slab in the magister’s laboratory again, made over new, only now his body hummed with pleasure instead of torment, and Anders was whispering nonsense into his ear, still gently stroking him as if trying to ease him through his orgasm. 

How could he at once feel so raw, so over-sensitive, and yet so content? His body twitched with the fading jolts of his climax, pleasant reverberations like the effect of Anders’s electricity trick, only no magic had caused this, just the working of muscle and the friction of body against body. 

With a final, languid caress, Anders released his softening cock and seemed ready to move away, to slip out of Fenris and inch over to his side of the bed. Fenris held him fast, knowing the mage’s arse would be dappled with fingertip-shaped bruises the next day but not yet ready to relinquish the intimacy that all too often had made him uncomfortable and had made his markings itch, the lyrium seeming to squirm beneath his skin. The mage settled back in behind him with a sigh – of contentment rather than annoyance, Fenris knew; Anders always seemed a bit put-out when he got up to wash immediately after they’d fucked – and ran his fingers up and down over Fenris’s stomach as if he were plucking a harp’s strings, leaving streaks of Fenris’s come on his skin. 

The urge to shrug Anders off him, get out of bed, and scrub himself clean stirred, but he tried to bat it away like a nagging insect. There had always been so much more artifice involved with Danarius, he realized, though the pain had always been real – philtres, scented oils and creams, and, of course, magic that fogged the senses, obscured smells, cleaned away unwanted fluids. All of it had somehow sanitized something that had been made unclean through its violence, and had made it seem unclean in his mind because he’d believed it _had_ to be sanitized to be acceptable. Danarius had always kicked him away afterward – or during – complaining of the blood and the mess, saying that he was no better than an animal, and that perception had inexorably bled into his relations with Anders. He had never looked down on the mage for being the one to be taken – if anything, he’d felt grateful, perhaps even a bit awed that Anders would subordinate himself in such a way. It was a tangle he wished he could unravel as easily as picking out crooked stitches. He inhaled, expecting the scents of amber, myrrh, and musk layering heavy and rich over the scent of blood, but now he smelled only sweat and semen – his own and Anders’s – and the warm, human odor of Anders’s breath as it gusted over his cheek. 

“I didn’t care about Danarius,” he blurted, the words sudden, unexpected, like a bird flying in an open window and flapping about in distress to escape. Not even the lush, satiated languor oozing through him could keep the bitterness from his voice when he said the magister’s name. 

“I never thought—” Anders began, confusion threading through the sleepiness in his voice. 

“He said I had affection for him once, but I never did.” Fenris chewed on his lower lip, still numb and swollen from Anders’s kisses. He believed the mage, knew that Anders had never suspected him of having had any true affection for the magister, and yet it seemed somehow important to say it out loud. “Unless you can be said to care for a feral lion who protects you from other lions but regularly savages you with its claws.” 

Anders’s arms tightened around him, and he felt the damp press of the mage’s lips on the muscle of his shoulder again. “No,” Anders said finally, his voice soft. “No, it’s not the same. There should never be any f—” The word was choked off, strangled as if by crushing fingers, but Fenris knew what he had been about to say: _fear_. The mage cleared his throat and went on, the brightness in his voice as false and alluring as the fool’s gold the _soporatus_ alchemists tried to peddle as the real thing in the bazaars of Minrathous. “There has to be some choice in the matter. Justice once accused me of enslaving Ser Pounce-a-lot, but Pounce _chose_ to stay with me, because he… because we were companions, friends. If he’d wanted to go, all the dried mackerel in Ferelden couldn’t have kept him at my side.” 

“Did you just compare me to your cat?” Fenris asked, making the question as flat and sharp as hammered steel, and felt Anders’s lips curve into a smile against his shoulder blade. 

“I can’t think of a higher compliment,” Anders replied, his voice heavy and thick as if he were stifling a yawn, and the heave of his chest with his breath against Fenris’s back was slowing and deepening. If Fenris spoke now, would the mage assume it had been a dream when he awoke later? The Fade shaping itself to his desires as compensation for the disappointments of his waking life? 

Love – for that was what he had to call it, even if only to himself – had never seemed to him something one chose, as Anders had been hinting at with his ridiculous allusion to his cat. It was something that happened, seemingly at random, from what Fenris would tell. And what was love if one could simply walk away from it like Ser Pounce turning up his nose at his dish and sauntering off? How could it be as disposable as that? But would the alternative have been any better, if telling the mage what he felt for him became like a tether, a different kind of servitude? Perhaps it all came down to choice – again, he hated that Anders had been proven right about that so often – not necessarily _whom_ one loved but how and when, the choice to give oneself, knowing that the choice to take oneself away was always a possibility. The thickness that had congealed in his throat seemed to dissolve, and the fist that had been clutched around his heart for months slowly unclenched. 

“Mage, I… I am yours,” he forced out and felt his shoulders hunch as if cringing away from a blow, his body curling in on itself, away from Anders. The mage took the opportunity to carefully slide out of him, but he followed the curve of Fenris’s body with his own so that they remained nested together. 

Silence, long enough that Fenris began to wonder if Anders had heard him, but then Anders stirred behind him again, propping himself up on his elbow to stare down at Fenris. His golden gaze was a weight, coins counted out onto a scale, measuring Fenris’s words – Fenris didn’t look up at him, didn’t tilt his face upward under the pressure of that glance. 

“You are not,” Anders finally sputtered. “Being with someone out of lo— companionship doesn’t mean you _belong_ to them.” 

Fenris arched one eyebrow. Why did the mage keep correcting himself mid-sentence? Anders was rarely careful with his words, usually preferring to blunder around like a Bronto in a Chantry reliquary until he made himself understood or stood in the ruins of what he’d intended to say. “But if one _chose_ to stay with someone, chose to let them fill one’s house with cats, chose to fight alongside them for a cause one didn’t wholly believe in… what would that be called?” 

“Oh,” Anders said, though he sounded somehow vague to Fenris’s ears, as if he were actually mulling it over. And then, in a voice that sounded like a bucket of icy water had been up-ended over his head, “ _Oh_. I didn’t think – I mean, I knew that you must enjoy my company for some reason, since you didn’t rip my heart out within a week of meeting me, and you obviously enjoy other things about me, but….” He was sputtering again, the words slipping and sliding over one another like gravel tumbling downhill before a rock slide. “It’s not that I didn’t believe you were capable of it; I just never thought I’d hear you say – not that you _have_ – said, exactly, but I understand. That’s not a criticism, though! Or a complaint. I know I tend to say too much or too soon or both – I’ve been told as much before – but I wasn’t sure if you could ever overcome your – mostly justified! – reservations about….” 

He hated that amid that torrent of words, the mage had stumbled upon Fenris’s own fears and – however disjointedly – had articulated them. He _had_ worried that he’d never be able to say it, while simultaneously questioning if the words themselves or the saying of them were that important after all. It was easier to believe that it was simply discomfort with expressing closely held feelings – just the kind of thing that Hadriana would have gleefully preyed upon in the past – rather than an inability to feel them at all. Perhaps it was just a matter of putting a name to something amorphous and unquantifiable, and names had troubled him since meeting his sister – perhaps had always troubled him – as if his indecision between taking the name he’d been born with, the name of someone he’d forgotten ever being, or keeping the name given to him by Danarius had consigned him to some kind of half-existence. 

“Mage, shut up.” Fenris heard the faint click of Anders’s teeth against one another as he snapped his mouth shut. He turned his head to look up into the mage’s face – Anders’s brows were knitted together, a shallow vertical crease between them, and his usually full lower lip seemed slightly petulant now, as if he were pouting. When Fenris reached up and curled his arm around his head, though, drawing Anders down to meet his lips, the mage let himself be pulled, and as they kissed, Fenris felt him stiffen against the back of his thigh. 

He broke the kiss, his fingers tightening into a fist where they were tangled in the sweat-damp hair at the back of Anders’s head. Anders dipped his head as if seeking his lips, but Fenris turned away, letting the mage’s kiss land at the corner of his mouth and then follow the contour of his face in a series of smaller kisses over his cheek, along his cheekbone, on his eyelid, against the still-throbbing veins at his temple. 

“I love you.” The words hung in the air, mingling with the scent of their sweat, the drifts of cat hair, the older, familiar smells of dried wine, spent ashes, dry rot, not out-of-place as he’d feared, not broken or jagged like his own efforts at handwriting. Like they’d been there all along.


	29. Chapter 29

Fenris awoke to distant screams and, for a moment, the guilty, grateful relief that it was someone else being beaten washed over him. He blinked into the darkness, clearing the sleep from his eyes and the clinging threads of the Fade from his mind, but it wasn’t until the awareness of warmth at his back and around his waist – the concentrated warmth of a living being, not the thick, ambient warmth of a slave’s unventilated cell in the Tevinter summer – made him realize where he was. That, and the presence of a soft, if lumpy, mattress beneath him, rather than a stone floor.

He glanced over his shoulder and found Anders still asleep, his golden hair a rumpled veil over his face from which only the sharp tip of his long nose protruded. The mage seemed quiet, for a change – he was often just as talkative when asleep as when he was awake, except in sleep, he tended to let out small, yelping kit fox cries about the Archdemon instead of lecturing on mages’ rights. So the screams were not his. Fenris went still, waiting for the sound to come again, and when it did, he could hear the angular thunder of Qunari voices treading on the heels of it. 

Stomach twisting, he slid out from beneath Anders’s arm, doing his best to keep the mattress from pitching too much with his movements and trying to avoid disturbing the assorted cats who had joined them on the bed. He tugged on his leggings and pulled on a fresh tunic, strapped on his gauntlets, and crept down the stairs, leaving his sword behind. If Anders woke up while he was gone, he would notice the missing sword first, and whatever Qunari Fenris encountered in the street were far more likely to consider a sword-carrying elf a threat than a half-dressed one wearing strange gauntlets. 

Out in the street, he could hear more screams, the shouts of both human and Qunari voices, the clash of steel on steel. The acrid scent of _gaatlok_ singed his nostrils, and spires of smoke rose above the rooftops, still thin now, but the leaping of the shadows and flicker of firelight in the nearby square spoke of much larger gouts of smoke to come. He knew what a Qunari attack looked like – he’d seen it often enough on Seheron – but why here? Why in a city that they had somehow conquered by philosophy rather than by the sword? Fenris tightened his hands into fists to stop them shaking, not caring that the points of his fingerguards dug into his scarred palms. A city ruled officially by the Qunari was something he could survive or, if necessary, avoid, but Anders couldn’t. 

He was on the point of turning on his heel and heading back to the mansion, back to the hopefully still sleeping mage, when another scream, female and shrill with terror, rang out closer now, reverberating off the white stones of the mansion façades. At the opposite end of the narrow street, through the haze of smoke and _gaatlok_ , Fenris could make out three shapes, two hulking and horned, the third – the woman who had screamed; he could just discern the gleam of silver embroidery on her skirts – sprawled on the paving stones in a heap. As he watched, one of the Qunari stooped over and grabbed the woman’s ankle, dragging her toward the stairs that led from Hightown Estates to the Chantry Courtyard. She shrieked all the while, her eyes rolling with terror, the whites of them flashing in the faint glow of the nearby flames. Fenris supposed he should be stepping in to help her; Anders – no, _Justice_ – would have been disappointed that he hadn’t, but at that moment, all he wanted was for her to be quiet so as not to wake the mage. Whatever the Qunari were doing, it was too dangerous for Anders and his self-righteous, meddlesome spirit to be aware of. 

“ _Shanedan_ ,” Fenris called, walking slowly toward the Qunari and their squirming burden. “ _Maraas shokra_.” 

The Qunari exchanged a look, a flicker of an eyelid here, the minute quirk of a gray lip there – reactions that would have been equivalent to a gasp of shock in a human. The noblewoman took the eye-blink of silence to gather her breath and let loose another scream. One of the Qunari crouched down to tear a strip from her gown and stuffed it into her gaping mouth, stopping up her cries. 

“An elf speaking Qunlat?” one of them said, the faintest hint of disbelief tingeing his voice. “This city of _kabethari_ is even madder than the Arishok believes.” 

“If Qunlat were being spoken by a _dathrasi_ , perhaps,” the other replied, straightening. “Or a Tevinter.” Fenris was glad of the darkness to hide his own sneer of disgust. “Are you _viddathari_ , elf?” 

He forced his face to smoothness. Plenty of the elves in the Kirkwall Alienage had converted to the Qun, so it would not be out of the ordinary if he said yes, and it seemed unlikely that Qunari would share any useful information with an unconverted _bas_. “Yes,” he replied in Qunlat. “What is happening here?” 

“The Viscount has been kidnapped by some of the _bas_ and _basvaarad_ from the Chantry. We are gathering the rest of them at the Keep and will hold them there until he is returned.” The Qunari gave Fenris a long, weighing look. “You will not be taken. Elves have no value to the _basra_ in this blighted place.” 

“Will the… _bas_ taken to the Keep be harmed?” Fenris asked. He had little love – _very little_ – for his Hightown neighbors, who seemed offended by the mere presence of an elf in their midst, even one who moved like a ghost through their hallowed streets, when he left the mansion at all. They reminded him too much of the insouciant nobility of Tevinter, wilting on their beds of silks, too lazy to even hold themselves upright. However unjust it might have been for them to be held hostage for a crime they had most likely been unaware of, Fenris couldn’t consider their loss particularly great either. Kirkwall was top-heavy, Hightown like a bar of gold dropped onto sand, slowly compressing everything beneath it. 

Anders alone might not have cared either, but with Justice’s influence, he was certain to vacillate between being outraged at the injustice of innocent people’s lives being threatened and complaining about the injustice of nobility itself, of certain people being given everything by accident of birth rather than through earning it. Which at any other time Fenris would have nodded in agreement with, but at the moment Kirkwall was more like a keg of _gaatlok_ than usual, and it was all too possible that Anders himself would be one of the sparks that ignited it. Still, if the choice was between lying to Anders and being honest, Fenris would have preferred the latter. 

The Qunari gave a slight hitch of his massive shoulders. “It is not our duty to question the Arishok’s orders.” 

Fenris opened his mouth to make as bland a reply as possible, but before he could speak, Anders’s voice drifted to his ears. “Fenris? Fenris, love, where are you?” 

It was a soft call, thin as the finest vellum, but Fenris caught his breath at the sound of it all the same. Judging by the unperturbed expressions on the faces of the Qunari – though when did Qunari _not_ look unperturbed? – they hadn’t heard. 

He took a step back toward the mansion, giving the Qunari a slight formal bow. He tried not to look at the noblewoman, though he could see the silvery trails that the moonlight made of her tears. “ _Panahedan. Anaan esaam Qun._ ” 

The Qunari gave him curt nods and headed toward the stairs to the Chantry Courtyard, the woman’s muffled cries growing in urgency the closer they dragged her to the flight of white stone steps. Fenris waited until the tips of the Qunari’s horns had disappeared below the edge of the first step before turning on his heel and running back toward the mansion. 

Anders met him on the threshold, catching Fenris’s shoulders to stop him short of running into him but not protesting when Fenris shoved him back inside and shut the door behind them. He thought he even detected a hint of amusement in the mage’s eyes, even in the dim gray light of the foyer. 

“Are you all right, Fenris? I woke up, and you were… well, at least I don’t have to worry about you being dragged away by the templars, but—” Fenris could hear a smile heating Anders’s voice; sometimes he imagined the mage’s words were like tiny flames he could cup his hands around to warm them. “Does this mean I get to scold you for leaving without telling me where you were going?” 

All Fenris’s plans for subterfuge melted like frost in the morning sun. He clutched at Anders’s upper arms, the feathers of his pauldrons tickling his bare palms and the undersides of his fingers. The mage’s coat had always seemed like such a fluttering absurdity, but the soft, flittering graze of them, the brief stabs of their spines, now represented Anders himself to him – the whispered, sweet-voiced words with the threat of an acidic bite of sarcasm; the gentle brush of silky lips followed by the scrape of teeth; the delicate, palpating fingers that raked his back and left bruises on his arse. Fenris sank his fingers into the feathers, clenching his hands into fists, not caring that the quills pricked the markings on his palms. 

“It’s the Qunari. They’re laying siege to Hightown and taking everyone to the Keep. We should be safe here, but….” 

“I can’t say I’d regret the loss of Hightown,” Anders said, disgust twisting his mouth. “But why would they attack?” He sniffed the air. “Is that smoke? Did you see anyone who might need healing?” 

Fenris bit on his lower lip until he tasted blood, trying to think of the best way to negotiate with a spirit of Justice and a man who’d trained his entire adult life to heal. “No, I didn’t. There are fires in the street, but the Qunari aren’t hurting anyone,” he said, the half-truths coating his tongue like greasy soot. “I spoke to some of them in the street. They said the Viscount has been kidnapped by… someone from the Chantry? _Basvaarad_?” He bit his lip, trying to puzzle out what that word could mean in the Free Marches. “Templars?” 

Anders stiffened in his grip at the word, and Fenris grasped him harder, as if the mage were going to run out the door and hurl himself into battle against the templars at the Qunari’s side. Which, Fenris realized, was an entirely likely and appropriately ridiculous thing for Anders to do. His fingers knotted around the handfuls of feathers in their grasp. “You can’t go out there. You can’t.” He dragged Anders toward him, pressing his forehead to Anders’s, tasting the mage’s breath, swallowing it down and turning it into a disjointed flow of words. “They will sew your mouth shut, and you wouldn’t survive it. You can’t – I won’t let you—” 

Even though the shade of his eyelashes, Fenris could see the muted blue glow that told him that Justice had been lured by the word “templar” as easily as Anders had been. “I won’t let you take him,” he muttered through gritted teeth. Why hadn’t Anders concocted the potion to separate himself from the spirit yet? They could have been leagues away from all of this by now and left the people of Kirkwall to the quagmire they had created for themselves. 

Long, cool fingers gently pried Fenris’s hands from Anders’s pauldrons, easing each steel-clad finger out of the fists they were clenched into. “What is happening is unjust, Fenris,” Justice said, the spirit’s voice softer than he’d ever heard it, like the buzzing of an enormous beehive. “It is our duty to correct this injustice.” 

“Do not think I cannot stop you, spirit. I have done so before.” He let his markings flare, not long enough to distract the spirit with the “song” of them that it seemed so drawn to, just a quick warning, a reminder of how easily he could slip his fist into Anders’s abdomen and incapacitate the body Justice seemed determine to commandeer. 

“We will not be distracted by your wiles, elf,” Justice said, louder now, anger pulsing through his usual rumble. “Justice is far greater than the wishes of two mortal beings.” 

“So you admit that this is against Anders’s wishes?” Fenris spat, clinging to the spirit’s misstep. “He is forced to accede to your wishes, but you see no injustice in ignoring his?” Something hot and wet rolled down Fenris’s cheek, and he nudged his face against Anders’s, both to wipe it away and – to his shame – so that the mage could feel his desperation, as if the slickness of Fenris’s tears on his own cheeks would somehow summon Anders back from wherever Justice banished him. “How is it just to endanger him against his will in a fight he cannot win?” 

“Anders accepted these risks when he agreed—” 

“But you are his friend! Shouldn’t his safety mean anything to you?” Fenris insisted. “It is foolishness. One mage can’t stop this.” He sucked in a breath, hearing the trembling in it, the wetness. “And what becomes of the Circle mages when Anders is dead?” 

“I can hear both of you, you know,” Anders said, the light, crisp warmth of his voice like sunlight breaking through a rent in heavy clouds. “I should have some say in this, shouldn’t I? Instead of being talked over like a naughty apprentice sent to the First Enchanter’s office.” 

“You have never seen yourself when your spirit takes you over,” Fenris replied. 

“Not in quite this situation, no,” Anders mumbled, his eyelashes brushing Fenris’s cheek as he looked down, but Fenris ignored him. 

“Mage, please, I am begging you. If you let your spirit drag you into that, you will be taken by one side or the other. Perhaps _qamek_ can end spirit possession, but I doubt the Qunari would waste the dose on an abomination, and we _know_ that death ends it.” He willed Anders to lift his gaze, and after a moment he did, leaving Fenris to stare at the beseeching expression of his own reflection overlaid on the amber of the mage’s eyes. 

“If they threaten the Gallows…” Anders began, Justice’s thunder muted to a low murmur, like voices heard from another room. 

“Yes, I know,” Fenris said, even as he wondered if he could hinder Justice then, though he knew that Anders would never forgive him if he did, if mostly because the spirit wouldn’t _allow_ him to forgive. “We can go upstairs for the view of the harbor. The Qunari will have to besiege the Gallows by boat, and if they do, we will know before they dock.” 

Anders hesitated a moment, blue light flickering in his eyes like a candle flame in a draft, but finally he let Fenris take his hand and lead him up the stairs to the tower room. 

****************

The mage’s silhouette briefly blotted out the glow of the flames in the Chantry Courtyard before sliding back into the surrounding shadows, like an inky curtain being opened and drawn over and over. Even against the orangey light behind him, the lines of his shoulders and face were blurred by the riffling of his feathered pauldrons with his movement and the halo of loose hair that seemed almost to stand on end. 

“Magic,” he said, and his voice sounded tight but also distracted, as if he were holding the reins of a wild horse and all of his concentration were focused on that rather than what he was saying. “The air is crackling with it. Can you feel it?” 

“Of course,” Fenris replied, hearing the tightness in his own voice like an echo of that in Anders’s, though he knew its source was very different from that of the mage’s. “It is a constant burn beneath my skin.” 

Anders paused in his pacing, and his shape, flattened into featurelessness by the darkness, seemed somehow considering. They had agreed it would be safer to leave the hearth and sconces unlit, for even the smallest flame would have been a beacon in the tower of an otherwise empty-appearing mansion, but Fenris was finding himself unnerved by not being able to see the mage’s face – it was so easy to read Anders’s thoughts and feelings in his expressions, and without being able to see them, the mage was as incomprehensible and opaque to him as the written word had once been. 

A wisp of blue healing magic skated over his skin, trailing like cool fingers, and the burn of his markings subsided. He almost thanked Anders out of habit, forgetting that he had used magic on him without Fenris having asked for it, which he supposed was a measure of just how unsettled Anders was. But before he could decide between voicing his thanks, swallowing the words back down, or sarcastically pointing out the mage’s oversight, Anders spoke. 

“It’s not like any magic I’ve ever felt,” he said. “It’s wild, destructive. And there’s just… so much of it.” The last words were breathed, though Fenris couldn’t tell whether they were spoken in fear or in awe. That it might have been the latter made an itch start up on his skin that had little to do with whatever magic was being done in the streets of Hightown. He’d reconciled himself as much as he ever would to the fact that Anders did magic, but to hear the admiration of and desire for that power so naked in the mage’s voice made threads of fear, disgust, and anger twist tightly together in his stomach. 

“It is the Saarebas,” he said, hearing his own voice come out as a dry, brittle croak. “They are trained only to destroy.” He bit down on the soft skin inside his lower lip – it was still swollen and sore from the mage’s kisses – and wondered if he should bother disabusing Anders of any foolish notions he might have had about the Saarebas. The scales should have fallen from the man’s eyes as soon as he’d learned that the Saarebas were little more than leashed dogs, trained to attack at their master’s command, but he had been aware of slavery in the Imperium and had still had his head full of fairy tales about a land where mages ruled. “I have little doubt that a patient healed with your spirit magic would be considered contaminated.” 

Anders turned away sharply to face the window, the scrape of his boots on the dusty floorboards loud to Fenris’s ears. Fenris thought his shoulders were hunched a bit, though with his pauldrons it was difficult to tell. He wondered what Anders was seeing through the dirt-and-pigeon-shit-smeared glass – he could imagine the golden-brown eyes made warmer by the reflection of the flames in them, see the faint pleating of Anders’s brow as he furrowed it. Was he quarreling in his mind with Justice, the fingers gripping the window ledge white-knuckled with the effort of keeping their shared body where it was instead of charging into the street? Or was he puzzling through the opportunity that the Qunari attack presented – undoubtedly the templars would be called upon to help protect the city, leaving their charges thinly guarded. 

“I just don’t understand _why_ ,” Anders murmured, and Fenris was relieved to hear a musing quality enter his voice. The mage hadn’t acknowledged his warning about the Saarebas, but at least Fenris’s words seemed to have distracted him from dwelling on the magic still surging like floodwater from all over Hightown. He could already feel it pulling at his markings again, those first annoying prickles like the barbed feet of a beetle crawling along the sinuous lines of lyrium. “Why kidnap the Viscount?” Anders laughed, a mirthless, wrung-out sound. “For once I don’t think that Meredith is behind this. She handpicked the last Viscount from what I understand, so if Saemus displeased her that much, she could easily do away with him as well and no one would stop her.” 

“Except the Qunari,” Fenris pointed out. “I have seen them fight on Seheron against the armies of the Imperium. They are formidable.” 

He heard the tap of Anders’s fingertip on the dry wood of the window sill, beating out an irregular rhythm as if it could dislodge thoughts from his head like flour being sifted through a sieve. “Exactly. She would know that it would be up to the templars to drive the Qunari out, and I can’t imagine she’d be willing to sacrifice them to anything except the destruction of blood mages, apostates, and other undesirables.” Anders gave a little snort of half-laughter. “Imagine if Meredith had been the only thing keeping the Qunari at bay all this time? And once she fucked off to Val Royeaux, they saw their chance?” 

“The Qunari I met in the street said the Chantry was behind it,” Fenris said. “Perhaps the Grand Cleric has grown tired of seeing her congregation dwindle in favor of the Qunari?” 

Anders sniffed, his derision so intense that it showed in his posture. “As if Elthina could ever rouse her decrepit bones to organize a kidnapping. She probably has difficulty picking out which Chantry robes she’s going to wear every day, even though they’re all the same—” He broke off, his silhouette suddenly tense – he looked to Fenris like one of the cats hearing a mouse scrabbling inside the walls, the same rigid, listening posture, ears cocked to something Fenris couldn’t hear. “That’s… that’s _Circle_ magic,” he said finally. “Surely, Orsino wouldn’t… surely _Cullen_ wouldn’t….” 

Fenris rose from where he’d been sitting with his sword across his lap, trying to keep himself between Anders and the doorway in case the mage tried to bolt. “All the more reason why you are not needed out there,” he said, sheathing his sword and going to stand beside Anders at the window. It was somehow comforting to be able to see the mage’s face again, even if it was being illuminated by fires that threatened to engulf the district in which they lived. 

“Do you think they have been ordered to fight?” Anders asked, though Fenris doubted he wanted an answer from him. “They are no better than their enemies then, though when has hypocrisy deterred a templar from anything?” 

“They could have chosen to fight,” Fenris suggested, not really believing it himself. He would not have lifted a finger in defense of Minrathous unless Danarius had ordered him to, and it had been his home as much as Kirkwall was to the mages in the Gallows. 

“I suppose it would be asking too much for this to mean that the templars have been smashed and the mages freed?” Anders said, a pained gulp of laughter catching in his throat. 

“Would you run directly from lifelong imprisonment into battle with an enemy who is certain to kill you?” Fenris asked. “If you weren’t possessed by a spirit of Justice, of course.” He followed Anders’s gaze – the Chantry Courtyard was lit up like the sky on Satinalia, purple electricity magic arcing upward toward the clouds even as balls of flame seemed to rain down from them. 

“They have no way of knowing what they face in the Qunari. This must be Orsino’s doing. Or Cullen’s,” he admitted more grudgingly. If the Knight-Captain had let the mages take part in the fighting, the situation must have been grave indeed. Though he realized the dangers posed by the Qunari, Cullen had seen firsthand the results of mages having their leashes loosened, however briefly, and Fenris doubted he would have risked another uprising like the one at Kinloch Hold. 

“Meredith shouldn’t have even bothered with the Right of Annulment,” Anders spat, and Fenris could hear the tiny screech as his gritted teeth scraped against one another. “She’ll return from Val Royeaux to find her work done for her.” 

From far below came the clanking thud of an armored fist on the front door, the whole house seeming to sigh in protest with the force of the knock. 

The golden-brown of Anders’s eyes made thin bracelets around his wide pupils. “Your Qunari friends?” he asked, his words hanging like dust in the air between them, whispered even though whoever was knocking could not have heard them. Still, at the moment, Fenris thought their visitor could have heard the pounding of his own heart even from three floors below. 

“I do not think—” His words were cut off as the knock rattled through the mansion again, and with it a distant scrap of a voice floated upward from the street along with the ash from the fires. 

“Serah Elf!” 

At the sound of the voice, Fenris’s stomach squirmed like the disembodied lizard tails Knight-Commander Meowedith left writhing on the courtyard paving stones. Desperation and smoke had roughened the usual lazy-sounding plumminess of it, but it was undeniably Cullen, appearing as if he were a spell cast by Anders speaking his name. Fenris darted a glance at Anders, who was staring at him expectantly, as though waiting for an explanation. But what was there to explain? Fenris didn’t know how the Knight-Captain could have found him – he’d never noticed himself being followed on his crossings back to Hightown from the Gallows, and years of being tracked by Danarius’s faithful hounds had gotten him well into the habit of looking over his shoulder. 

“One of your posh neighbors looking for refuge?” Anders asked, and Fenris expected the window panes to be filigreed with frost at the chill in his voice. Justice flickered in and out of his eyes like distant lightning. 

“I will go see who it is,” Fenris said, his throat contracting around the words until they seemed to scrape out of him, dry and painful. “You should remain here.” 

The only response was a narrowing of eyes that couldn’t settle on if they wanted to be human and bright as faceted amber or vacant whirling pits of blue light, and a tick of the head to the side, a shake aborted midway through. 

“I have only ever done what you asked of me,” Fenris said. “Remember that.” And he darted out of the room, leaping down the steps three at a time, the ungraceful thunder of Anders’s footsteps hard upon his heels. 

He reached the foyer before Anders and threw open the front door just as the mage stumbled through the doorway from main hall. They were greeted by the tableau of Knight-Captain Cullen, fully armored in smoke-and-blood-streaked plate, cradling the slight form of the First Enchanter in his arms. Blood trailed in syrupy strands from Orsino’s dangling hand, and he was so still that it wasn’t until he groaned when Cullen staggered over the threshold that Fenris realized that he wasn’t dead. 

“Well, put me in a dress and call me him,” Anders rasped, his breathlessness not able to fully overwhelm the sarcasm thick in his voice. “And I genuinely thought that you could overcome your hatred for at least _one_ mage, Fenris.” Magic tugged at Fenris’s markings as Anders called the angry red glow of fire wisps into his hands, ready to hurl them at Cullen, if not at Fenris himself. “I suppose you saved me from the Qunari to hand me over to your _associate_ here.” 

Fear swooped through Fenris like a black-winged bird, but anger followed quickly behind it, and he rounded on the mage. “How easily you forget the hundreds of nights I could have pulled out your heart while you slept if I’d wanted to,” he muttered, a growl low in his throat, low enough that he hoped Cullen wouldn’t hear – he felt suddenly, inexplicably uneasy with the idea of the templar knowing the true connection between him and Anders, though he was sure it wasn’t because of fear of punishment for hiding an apostate. Perhaps some vestiges of shame still clung to him from the Imperium, where such relations between two men were only permitted between master and slave, forever unequal. 

“So I guessed rightly that your master was a mage,” Cullen said, some of his usual self-possession returning to his voice, clotting it up like cream. 

Fenris saw Anders flinch even as he felt himself do the same, and the mage’s indignant “I am _not_ his master!” trampled on the heels of Fenris’s own furious “I have no master!” 

Cullen’s eyes flicked toward Anders, at the threatening beacons of magic in his fists, but the man seemed unperturbed. If anything, his face smoothed, and to Fenris he looked almost bored. “I would not like to have to Smite you, mage,” he said, his tone languid, disinterested, as if he were accustomed to both being faced with being hit with a ball of fire and to threatening mages with what Fenris assumed was something unpleasant at best, violent at worst. “Not least because the First Enchanter needs your healing skills.” 

Being called “mage” had usually gotten no more than a smirk from Anders when Fenris did it, but from the templar’s mouth, it sounded like a curse, a slur, and Anders bristled at the sound – if he had been one of the cats, he would have been hissing, fur on end, tail puffed. As it was, his lips peeled back from his teeth in an ugly sneer, and Fenris saw two pinpoints of swirling blue flare into his eyes. Turning his back on Cullen, he stepped toward Anders, letting light fill his markings in the hope that their brightness would drown out any glow from Justice. He could answer the Cullen’s questions about the lyrium in his skin later, let him throw whatever templar tricks at him that he pleased to prove that Fenris was no mage, so long as he kept Anders from revealing himself to be an abomination. 

“Mage, I swear to you that I know him only from delivering your letters to the Gallows,” Fenris said, trying to make his voice as soothing as he could while struggling to smooth the urgency and unease from it. “I have not been plotting with him, nor will I let him take you if I can help it.” He bowed his head, looking up at Anders through the pale haze of his hair, making his eyes as wide as he could. It was an expression he knew he’d often used on Danarius to make the magister go easier on him – though it had only infuriated Hadriana and made her beat him twice as hard – and he hated himself for trying to manipulate Anders with it, just as much as he hated himself for wishing that the markings would lull the mage’s spirit as they had done in the past. 

“Indeed,” Cullen said from behind him, the drawl of his voice now cloying. Fenris could hear his boots shifting on the worn carpet, smell the dry rot stirred up by them – the templar must have been growing weary of his burden. “In fact, if you were the one who asked him to go to the Gallows on your behalf, you have only yourself to blame for my presence. Perhaps you should choose less conspicuous messengers in future.” 

Fenris’s markings stung as Anders gathered more of his magic, his long fingers wriggling as if eager to cast. Fenris grabbed his forearm, letting the claws of his gauntlets dig into the muscle through the thin fabric of the mage’s coat, a reminder of what he could do and had done to stop Anders if necessary. Another groan, weaker than the first, from Orsino thankfully drew the attention of both mage and spirit, and even Cullen’s face softened, his brow furrowing with something that could have been concern. 

“In truth, I would not have come here at all if not for the fact that he would not have survived the journey back to the Gallows,” the templar said, the arrogance sloughing off his voice like dead skin, exposing something soft beneath, almost timid. 

“He may still not survive,” Anders replied. “Bring him in here and let me examine him.” The incipient flames winked from his fingers as if they’d never been, and he shrugged out of Fenris’s grasp and led Cullen toward the kitchen. 

“Put him on the table,” he ordered, and Fenris recognized the brisk, dispassionate tone as the one Anders had often used with the helpers in his clinic when a seriously ill or injured patient was brought in. He helped Cullen lay the First Enchanter on the battered table before the cold hearth, though the templar could hardly have needed his assistance – Orsino weighed next to nothing, even swathed in his heavy velvet robes. 

Anders had already summoned globes of pale blue healing magic, and as soon as Fenris and Cullen backed away from the table, he sent them racing over the supine form of the First Enchanter. The cool gleam of the wisps carved deep hollows of shadow in Orsino’s thin cheeks and under his closed eyes, even delving into the fluting of his finger bones. 

“What happened to him?” Anders asked, eyes never leaving his patient, fingers busy as if he were weaving together invisible threads. 

Cullen took off his heavy gauntlet and scrubbed his hand over his face, the light from the healing magic picking out the beads of sweat on his forehead that darkened the golden curls along his hairline. “I didn’t see. I would have guessed one of their mages – where have they been hiding them?! – but there was blood… I wasn’t certain if it was his or….” 

Anders’s gaze flicked up sharply toward the templar, but all he said was, “Yes, he has lost quite a bit of blood. I suppose those hideous robes absorbed most of it. The Knight-Commander won’t be pleased about that.” His words lacked their usual bite, though, which told Fenris that the First Enchanter’s condition was very serious indeed. He had seen Anders maintain his sarcasm through most healings – it was only when the patient was on the brink of death that that front of irreverence slipped away, revealing a seriousness almost unnerving in its focus. 

Ribbons of magic spooled from Anders’s fingers almost too quickly for Fenris to comprehend, intertwining over the First Enchanter before sinking into his body. It seemed to Fenris that healing magic required some kind of exchange, some sacrifice – though he was unsure if Anders actually took any of his patients’ ailments or injuries into himself, there was always a point in the process when their cheeks began to flush with health while the mage’s paled, when their uneven breath calmed while Anders’s turned into rasping pants. 

But now only the faintest bloom returned to Orsino’s waxen cheeks, though Anders himself had gone stark white and sheened with sweat. 

“Fenris, I need your assistance,” Anders said, still in that strange voice that should have had the depth of Justice tempering it but did not. 

“Of course,” Fenris replied, steeling himself for the pull of magic on his markings, the feel of his skin being scoured as if he were standing naked in a sandstorm in the Hissing Wastes. The grateful look Anders gave him – eyes curved into crescents, eyelashes almost blotting out the fond gleam in them – was something of a balm, but the pain made him catch his breath all the same. Having a mage draw on the mana in his markings had been a daily occurrence in Minrathous – nearly an hourly one – but it had been months since Anders had asked it of him, and longer than that since Hadriana’s magic had clawed desperately for it before he’d killed her. 

Finally, Orsino let out a ragged gasp, and his eyes bolted open, wide and glassy, though still dull. They darted from side to side before fixing on Anders. “You!” he breathed, and his voice was a faded imitation of its usual richness, as threadbare and worn as the mansion’s carpets were in comparison to the sumptuous ones in the Chantry. “It is done.” 

Then his eyes sank closed again, and the First Enchanter seemed to fall into a deep sleep, his narrow chest rising shallowly. Anders stumbled back from the table, catching himself on the mantel, one hand coming up to press against his brow. 

“He may still die,” he said. “I’ve done all I can.” He sat down heavily on the brick ledge of the hearth, head in his hands. 

“What did he mean?” Cullen asked. “‘It is done’?” 

Anders’s head jerked up, and he glared at the templar as if realizing for the first time who Cullen was and why he was there. “How should I bloody know? The battle with the Qunari? The existence of the Circle in Kirkwall? The latest _Swords & Shields_ serial?” 

“He seemed to know you,” Cullen persisted. 

Anders rolled his eyes, and his voice took on an overly patient tone, as if he were explaining something to a child or trying to tell Soporatus why he shouldn’t eat the chunks of fallen plaster in the main hall. “He has taken a grave injury and lost a great deal of blood. Most people wouldn’t exactly be lucid in such circumstances. Maybe he mistook me for the Maker and thought he’d crossed the Veil.” Before Cullen could respond, Anders pushed himself to his feet, wavering like a sapling in a gale. “We should get him somewhere more comfortable.” 

Fenris stepped forward to take Orsino’s ankles and help Cullen lift him off the table, but the templar was too quick for him, gathering the First Enchanter up in his arms. He followed Anders and Fenris up the stairs to their bedroom and laid Orsino carefully on their bed before pulling one of the armchairs over and settling into it. Fenris dragged the other chair so it was equidistant between Anders, who was pacing back and forth along the width of the fireplace, and the templar. 

“How long will he be like that? Cullen asked. He sounded tentative, as if he didn’t want to anger Anders, though now that Orsino had been healed, there was no reason he couldn’t simply Smite him. “He will be needed.” 

“For what?” Anders demanded. “Why was he even there?” 

A brief, inexplicable blush darkened the crests of Cullen’s cheekbones. “He was helping to protect Kirkwall against the Qunari threat,” he replied, his voice faltering. 

Anders let out a snort of laughter and stormed over to the wardrobe, wrenching it open and rifling through it, the clinking of glass the only sound as he sorted through his many potions. “By choice or because he was ordered to?” was his muffled question. “Why would a prisoner want to save the city where he was being held captive?” 

“You know the answer to that very well, if your _friend_ here has told you anything,” Cullen snapped. Fenris’s face burned at the way the templar said “friend”, the implication in it, and he was suddenly uncomfortably aware of the disarray of the bedclothes, the crusted stains on the blanket. “I have good reason to suspect that the Qunari will make for the Gallows, now that the templars are defending the city.” Cullen bowed his head, hand coming up to rub the back of his neck. “And now that they are aware that there are mages being kept there.” 

Fenris thought he saw blue veins of light crack the surface of Anders’s hand as it gripped the wardrobe door, but when the mage leaned back, a forced smirk crooking his lips, his eyes were human – gleaming with barely controlled anger, but human. 

“Oh, well done, you,” Anders said, and Fenris thought he might have almost forgiven Cullen for Smiting him for the insolence in his tone. The mage brought an armful of potions to the bed and gently pried open Orsino’s mouth, lifting his head just enough for the liquid to trickle down his throat. 

An entire vial of crimson healing potion had disappeared down Orsino’s gullet before he spluttered, coughing a fine spray of potion, blood, and saliva onto his chin. His eyes opened for the second time, and they seemed brighter, more aware… and, after a moment of confused blinking, infinitely more sad. 

“They’re gone,” he murmured. “Maker, they’re all gone.” 

The empty bottle slipped from Anders’s fingers and shattered on the floor, but no one made a move to sweep up the pieces. 

“What do you mean, Orsino?” Anders asked slowly, as if his throat were lined with the shards of glass at his feet and every word pained him to speak it. “Maker’s arse, what do you mean ‘ _all_ ’?!’” 

The First Enchanter just stared up at him with dazed eyes, and finally Cullen cleared his throat and muttered, “He means all of the mages who came with him to fight the Qunari.” 

Fenris watched Anders take a slow, deep breath, his eyes squeezing shut, and then shield his face with a hand pressed to his forehead as if to hide any appearances from Justice. He wondered if the mage had always had that habit, or if he’d learned to use the gesture to conceal his spirit after they’d merged. He and Anders were both collections of such gestures, Fenris thought, meant to obscure, to hide, to manipulate. 

“How many?” Anders asked. Tiredness and anger sparred with one another in his voice, two opponents too weary to do more than halfheartedly feint. “Were they forced to do this? Because I cannot imagine that you would start giving mages choices now.” 

Cullen sat up a little straighter, plate armor dully clanging with the movement. “I did let them choose. Any Harrowed mages willing to fight under the leadership of the First Enchanter and myself were permitted to make the crossing.” 

“Mages who have never been taught any magic for combat were _permitted_ to face mages whose sole purpose is battle,” Anders said, thin upper lip curling up into a sneer. 

“Clearly any decision I could have made would have been the wrong one in your opinion,” Cullen said. “Fortunately, I do not have to answer to _you_.” 

Anders laughed, not the usual bright laughter that crinkled the corners of his eyes, but something darker, uglier. “No, you’ll have to answer to Meredith, and while she’ll probably be grateful to have some mages taken off her hands, I’m sure she’d rather you had made them Tranquil. Lots of coin to be made off the Tranquil. Though I’m certain you are well aware of _all_ of their uses.” 

Cullen shot to his feet quicker than a man weighed down by plate and exhaustion should have been able to, his chair toppling over behind him. Fenris heard the rasp of steel being bared, that whisper that had become too sweet to his ears in his years on the run, and he hurled himself between the templar and Anders, not caring how his leap onto the bed jostled Orsino and made him groan in pain. For his part, Anders remained perfectly still, smirking up at Cullen, the honey brown of his eyes warm with something akin to amusement. 

“I have sworn to protect mages, and I have always done my duty, even at great cost to myself,” Cullen said. Fenris thought he detected the faintest tremor of the templar’s sword hand when he spoke of that personal cost, and Anders seemed to have noticed it as well, his eyes narrowing; he suddenly had the air of a wolf that has scented prey. 

In spite of the intent look that sharpened Anders’s features, when he spoke, Fenris had fully expected more of his ill-timed cheek. But instead the mage said, “You are Fereldan.” 

The faltering of Cullen’s sword hand was more pronounced this time, though it seemed more a twitch of surprise than a nervous tremulousness. “Yes,” he replied, the word curling up a bit at the end into a near-question. 

To Fenris’s shock, Anders’s face broke into a smile that was almost sincere, though he recognized it as the one the mage usually wore when he was pleased with himself at being right, rather than a welcoming or friendly expression. “I remember you now,” he said. “I thought it was just from seeing you at the Rose—” 

Cullen gave a choked cough. “Yes, my inquiries about missing recruits sometimes—” 

Anders waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t care who you pay to fuck. No, I recognize you from the Ferelden Circle. You look different, less baby fat, bit less wet behind the ears, more mage blood on your hands….” 

“Maker’s breath, mage!” Fenris cried, but Cullen didn’t waste any more words and lunged across the bed toward Anders. The tip of his heavy sword caught the mage on the cheekbone, carving out a thin red crescent before Fenris knocked it aside. 

“What’s another few drops, eh?” Anders said, running a thumb along the new cut and leaving a bloody smear. Then a blue wisp of healing magic flitted over his cheek, and the wound disappeared as if it had never been. His brow furrowed as he looked down at the still-bloody pad of his thumb. “No. No, perhaps that was a bit unfair.” He looked up at Fenris clutching Cullen’s wrist to hold him back from doing Anders any more damage with his sword and frowned. “I remember that you once let me heal myself when I was in the dungeon.” 

Cullen blinked, almost a flinch, and this time he nearly dropped his sword. “You—you were the one who was always escaping, weren’t you? You disappeared before…” He trailed off and then stepped back, sheathing his sword, leaving Fenris to almost collapse in relief on top of the prostrate Orsino. A hint of amusement, faintly bitter but amusement all the same, tinged his voice. “I was given privy duty for that, you know. They would have kept me out of the dungeons for years, if not for….” 

“You were kind,” said Anders. “And you’ve been kind to Orsino as well.” He chewed on his lower lip, watching himself nudge a shard of broken glass with the toe of his boot. “I wonder if you will be kind again.” 

Cullen pursed his lips, but finally he said, “What would you ask of me?” 

Anders’s eyelids fluttered as he blinked, and between one of those blinks, Fenris thought he saw the brief coruscation of Justice flash into the mage’s eyes. He felt himself tense, ready to plunge his fist through the templar’s breastplate if necessary to keep him away from Anders. He would have regretted it, of course – Cullen was a decent enough fellow – but he’d given more of himself to Anders than he’d given to anyone else, more than he’d ever imagined he want to or be able to give, and he wouldn’t let that be destroyed by templar’s sword, hangman’s noose, or Saarebas’s spell if he could help it. 

“Help me rescue the mages,” Anders said, and for a moment the look in his eyes as he stared up at Cullen was almost pleading. “However many remain in the Gallows. Help me free them.” 

“They certainly cannot stay where they are,” Cullen admitted. “As the largest army in the city, it is up to the templars to lead its defense, and though it _is_ our sworn duty, we cannot guard the mages and fight the Qunari at the same time.” His voice dropped, some of its customary pompousness muffled by a new, almost musing tone. “We are stretched thin enough as it is, with the Knight-Commander taking a large retinue to Val Royeaux. I took a small party into Hightown with me tonight in order to leave as many as possible guarding the mages, and it was not nearly enough.” 

Fenris glanced over at Anders as the templar spoke and saw the mage’s expression seem to turn inward. So Anders was conferring with Justice then. Not for the first time, he felt a confused resentment toward the spirit, partly that he was privy to so much more of Anders’s thoughts and feelings, and partly because he had so much influence over the mage, that after all the blackouts and lost time, Anders still trusted his opinion foremost. But, Fenris thought with a bitten-back smirk, that could have been because Anders still seemed to believe that Justice was just a part of him, and the mage always did think he was right. 

“It must be tonight, Templar,” Anders said. Fenris was sure he was the only one who would have noticed the sudden resonance in Anders’s voice, the rumbling depth that rang with the authority that his words usually sorely lacked. “Speak.” 

Cullen rubbed the back of his neck again – the man’s skin must have been rubbed raw from his gauntlets. “What of Orsino? You said he was still in danger.” 

Anders gave a careless shrug of one shoulder. It must have been a put-on, a deception to make Cullen believe the First Enchanter was not so bad off as he seemed. Fenris had never seen Anders so indifferent to a patient’s fate. “I will leave potions for him. He’ll be safe and comfortable enough here.” 

“Could not your…” Cullen broke off, giving Fenris an almost pleading glance, as if willing him to offer a name or an acceptable form of address. Fenris raised an eyebrow at him, and the templar gave an exasperated sigh and settled for gesturing in his direction. “Couldn’t he stay behind with the First Enchanter and watch over him?” 

But Anders was already shaking his head, strands of hair that must have been tied back in haste when he’d woken up and found Fenris gone springing free from their leather cord. “No. Fenris comes with me. With us.” 

Relief flooded through Fenris, loosening muscles that he’d been holding tense since the templar had arrived at their door, maybe since he’d awoken to the noblewoman’s screaming. 

“Very well,” Cullen said, though he sounded like he’d just bitten into a sour fruit and wanted to spit. “I will help you get the mages to safety.” Anders opened his mouth, but the templar raised a hand to forestall him. “I will help you if the remaining Harrowed mages agree to join in the fight with the Qunari.” 

Anders’s mouth snapped shut again, and his nose wrinkled in disgust. “You would make that demand after so many of them have already died doing just that? You’re making them choose between death or dying to win their freedom!” 

The templar crossed his arms over his chest and lifted his chin. He could strap that arrogance on like another suit of armor, both concealing and protecting the fear that Fenris knew he still clung to. “These are my terms. If you do not accept them, the mages may yet fight.” 

“Very well,” Anders said, upper lip peeled back from his teeth. “But you must allow them to come here first, so that Orsino can give them at least _some_ training.” He gave the limp form of the First Enchanter a brief, almost contemptuous glance. “Not that he has much combat experience himself.” 

_Why only Orsino?_ Fenris wondered. _Unless he is planning for us to leave Kirkwall as soon as the mages are out of the Gallows?_ It was almost certainly too much to ask that Justice would be satisfied by the mere removal of the Circle mages from the Gallows to the mansion, especially when some of them would still be in peril, but Fenris could not imagine why Anders, a former Grey Warden, would have left their training to Orsino alone, whom he knew Anders considered soft and lacking in magical talent. 

A strange flurry of expressions passed over Cullen’s face, a brief stitching-together of the brows, a flaring of the nostrils, a clenching of the jaw. His “Agreed” sounded forced through gritted teeth, but he reached out a hand to Anders, who stared at it as if it had the brand of Tranquility clutched in it before shaking it. 

“Now,” Cullen said, voice brisker now, more purposeful, “how do you propose we carry out this rescue? I can hardly saunter down to the docks in plain sight and hire a ferry for the crossing, and I doubt it would be wise for you to do so either.” 

“Easy,” Anders replied, a smile finally smoothing out the sneer on his lips. “I know another way in.” His smile deepened into a grin as Cullen’s eyes widened. “So, we get you in, you gather your templars to prepare for the Qunari landing, and the mages are released from wherever you have them penned and taken to Orsino. Then – if you survive the initial Qunari attack – you can come collect them at your leisure.” 

“Andraste preserve me,” Cullen breathed. “This goes against everything I believe, everything I have sworn to uphold.” An explosion – not far off, Fenris thought, judging by the sharp odor of _gaatlok_ that rolled in the empty window panes – shook the mansion, sending dust pouring down on them in pale torrents. Cullen cast his eyes upward, whether to make sure the ceiling wasn’t going to collapse on them or to appeal to the Maker, Fenris wasn’t sure, and said, “But I see no other way.”


	30. Chapter 30

“How could these have escaped my notice for so long?” Cullen asked, tipping his head back to stare up at the rough-hewn stone vault of the tunnel ceiling, its dried-blood color almost black in the gloom.

“I’m sure Ser Alrik and his ilk went to great lengths to make certain you _didn’t_ know about them,” Anders said, his voice incongruously hearty as it echoed through tunnels that stank of damp and decay. He clapped his hand on Cullen’s shoulder – Fenris saw the templar’s back straighten, out of surprise or a desire to arch away from the mage’s touch. “You should consider it a compliment, really. It means you still have a lingering hint of humanity.” 

“What do you know of Ser Alrik?” Cullen asked, stepping out of Anders’s reach, one hand closing around the pommel of his sword. It looked an innocent enough gesture, but Fenris knew it for what it was – anyone who had carried and used a sword for any length of time never touched it casually. 

“Enough,” Anders replied. “I know enough. Especially about his ‘Tranquil Solution’.” 

Cullen sighed, as if he were weary of the subject. “Which was seen for the madness it was and denied by everyone, from the Knight-Commander to the Grand Cleric. I can’t imagine what he was thinking – a templar’s duty is to watch over the mages in the Circle, and if they were all Tranquil, there would be no need for us.” 

“Maybe you really _were_ asking after recruits at the Rose,” Anders muttered. “The same could be said for the Right of Annulment, though, and yet Meredith is probably bathing her saddle sores as we speak after the ride to Val Royeaux. What will you do if she gets her wish and the Circle is annulled?” 

Before Cullen could reply, Fenris asked, “What of the Tranquil? Are we going to be rescuing them as well?” Would the templars have thought to gather the Tranquil or had they been left in the courtyard to guard their own wares? “They seem to have more freedom of movement than the mages, so it may be difficult to find them all before the Qunari arrive.” 

Anders stumbled, and Fenris unthinkingly reached and grabbed ahold of his belt to right him. Two faint streaks of red flushed the hollows beneath the mage’s cheekbones, diffusing into the dark stubble below. “I… had not considered that,” Anders said, his words tripping over one another as badly as his feet had. “Time will be at a premium, of course – the Qunari must be on their way already, and Cullen can only keep the other templars busy for so long....” He shot a sheepish glance toward Fenris from the corners of his eyes, and he must not have liked what he saw on Fenris’s face, for he swung his gaze away just as quickly. “There would be no point in the Qunari harming them, so—” 

“I know you find their presence disturbing, but they are still innocents,” Fenris protested. He had to own that he was unsettled by them as well, but what little he could remember of his mother brought the Tranquil to mind – how blank-eyed and dull she looked after a long day of work, how her shoulders were perpetually hunched from toil and cowering away from beatings. He had seen Tranquil scrubbing the white stone floor outside of the Knight-Commander’s office when he’d delivered letters to Orsino, their hands red and cracked from the free labor the templars wrung from them and wondered just how different they were from slaves. If they had chosen Tranquility out of fear, why should they still be punished for having once been a mage? And if they had been made Tranquil because of some crime, was that not their punishment in itself? 

“Just because you do not care for them doesn’t mean they should be left to the Qunari. You have often described the Circle Mages as slaves—” Cullen let out a huffy snort at that but being glared at by both Anders and Fenris seemed to discourage him from offering any verbal contradiction. “—but the Tranquil are far more deserving of the comparison. You know very well what the templars do to them. We cannot leave them to that fate any more than we can leave them to possible slaughter.” 

Anders gave him a wild-eyed look, his eyes so hot with anger they were like brands. Fenris would have stepped back from that look if Cullen hadn’t been standing there watching them. “That is not living, Fenris! They might thank me for giving them their deaths, if it came to that!” 

“That is not your decision to make for them!” 

“I am here for the mages!” Anders said. “Many of the Tranquil _chose_ their state because they were too afraid of—” 

“But others have not,” Fenris cut in. “Karl didn’t choose.” 

A brief shimmer of blue flickered over Anders’s face, and he turned away suddenly, as if to conceal Justice’s appearance from Cullen. But Fenris caught a glimpse of his expression – the buckling of the chin, the welling of tears in the eyes. 

“Don’t you dare! Don’t you bloody dare!” the mage managed to choke out, the rage in his voice muddled by grief. 

Cullen cleared his throat, an oddly polite gesture considering both their errand and the vehemence of Anders’s words. “It has been my observation that many of the Tranquil are quite content with their lot and seem to enjoy their work. I have heard it from their very lips.” 

“You blighted fool of a templar!” Anders snapped, and when the mage turned his enraged gaze on Cullen, Fenris was relieved that it was Anders’s face, twisted by anger but completely human. “Though I repeat myself, don’t I?” 

“You are both fools if you cannot see that this squabbling is a waste of time,” Fenris said. “We should move on before the arrival of the Qunari takes the decision from our hands.” 

Anders doled out one last glare equally between Fenris and Cullen before trudging onward through the ferns that choked the tunnel. It seemed that the passages had not been well-trodden since the last time they had been there nearly a year before. Fenris hoped that perhaps the remaining templars who knew of the tunnels feared what might be lurking in them after so many of their comrades had failed to return. What would they find in that last chamber before the entrance to the Gallows dungeons, where so many templars had met their end in the grip of a gauntlet or with a blast of magic? He glanced toward Cullen, trying to imagine what his reaction would be to finding the twisted remains of armor and bodies, scorched, bloodied, shattered. Their absence must have been remarked by someone, after all. 

Still, he was in no hurry to reach that chamber, not least because uncertainty waited beyond it. Would they have to fight their way through the dungeons, or would Cullen be able to convince his fellow templars to abandon their posts? 

Fenris looked at Anders, taking in the rigid set of his shoulders, the tension in his spine, and knew that he was not looking forward to what was to come, no matter how determined he was to free Kirkwall’s mages. Justice had not shown himself even when Anders had been arguing with Cullen, and the strain must have been immense. But Anders, though he seemed pleased when Fenris was the first to reach out to him, would not have welcomed the gesture this time, not in front of Cullen, in whose face he must have seen every templar who had ever kept him from Karl, who had ever punched an armored fist into his gut or applied a lash to his bare back. 

When they reached the yawning chamber with its rough steps carved directly from the stone of the walls, though, they found only bones, partly swallowed by clumps of ferns, and dark smears on the walls. Fenris blinked in surprise – he’d been expecting at least the gnarled, partially melted husks of some armor – and he glanced toward Anders in time to see the mage’s head jerk as if in shock. Cullen carried on up the stairs toward the dungeon entrance nonchalantly as if he noticed nothing out of the ordinary. After hesitating a moment, Anders followed him with Fenris close behind. 

“I will go in – hopefully unseen; I would not want to answer any questions about how I came to know of these tunnels – and tell my troops to gather in the Gallows Courtyard,” Cullen said, his voice low, even though the door that separated the cavern from the dungeon was thick and girded with studded iron. “Then I will return for you, and we can release the mages, so that you can lead them to safety and leave them in the First Enchanter’s care.” 

“You really think it’s going to be that easy?” Anders asked. The wide-eyed incredulity on his face was suddenly wiped away, and his voice lowered until Fenris tentatively sniffed the air for the sharp, burnt-sulfur smell that usually preceded Justice. “You know exactly where they are, don’t you?” 

Cullen bowed his head, though the movement did little to hide the blush that stained his cheeks. “Contingencies had to be made, precautions taken. It is when mages are in danger or frightened that they are most susceptible to possession,” he replied. His hand was on the pommel of his sword again, clutching it so hard the steel of his gauntlets creaked. “We gathered them in the dungeons—” 

Anders scoffed. “Of course you did. I’m surprised Meredith hasn’t taken to just keeping them there at all times.” 

“—which will make it far easier for us to rescue them now,” Cullen finished. He seemed to be trying to ignore Anders’s outbursts, but Fenris could tell the words had been pushed through tightly clenched teeth. To Fenris, he said, “If it eases your mind at all, the Tranquil are with the mages. Since they follow orders so well—” that with a pointed look at Anders “—I thought it would be useful for them to supervise the mages in case of an absence of templars.” He turned to the door, resting his hand on the latch. “I will return as quickly as I can. Be prepared.” 

After a moment’s pause, during which he seemed to be trying to decide whether he wanted to open the door or not, he said over his shoulder, the words tumbling over one another in a rush, “They... there is a possibility the mages have been dosed with magebane.” 

“Magebane?!” Anders cried, lunging toward the templar. Fenris caught him by the wrist and tugged him back, and fortunately Anders – or Justice – let himself be tethered. “Why? Under whose orders?” 

“A precaution,” Cullen repeated. “I have seen the effect of fear on mages. They will recover in a few hours, and by then the worst of the danger will have passed.” He swallowed hard enough that Fenris could hear it. “If the Maker is merciful.” 

With that, he tugged open the door and slipped through it. Fenris caught a glimpse of a dark stone corridor before the door was pulled shut. He strained to hear anything – shouted orders, the thud of boots – but there was only the eerie quiet whistle of the drafts through the tunnels and Anders’s breath, quick as if he’d been running. 

“Have I made a mistake?” Anders murmured, the doubt in his voice so palpable that Fenris turned to look at him. Anders glanced up at the movement, but his gaze dropped once more, his head bowed. 

“Are you asking me or are you conferring with your spirit?” Fenris asked. He knew how heavy with bitterness his words sounded, but he made no effort to sweeten them. 

“You, of course,” Anders replied, faint lines creasing his forehead as he furrowed his brow. “Unless you’re telling me that I talk to Justice out loud.” 

“I wonder why you would bother then,” Fenris said. He leaned against the rough stone wall, crossing his arms over his chest and hoping he looked at his ease, almost bored. Inside, he was thrumming with nervousness, ready to snap like an overdrawn bowstring at the slightest sound from the other side of the door. “Have I ever changed your mind about anything before?” 

Anders’s head snapped up, and Fenris nearly flinched away from the blend of shock, hurt, and earnestness on the mage’s face. “You have. Of course you have, Fenris.” He stepped closer and tried to rest his hands on Fenris’s shoulders, only to jerk them away when the spikes of Fenris’s pauldrons pricked at his palms. He settled his hands on either side of Fenris’s neck instead, his thumbs fanning back and forth along his jaw, and rested his forehead against Fenris’s. “You’re a bloody hedgehog, love,” he said, trying to laugh, but Fenris could hear a thickness in his throat, a humidity in his voice that sounded like coming rain. 

Fenris forced a laugh he didn’t feel, to please Anders, to prick the bladder of tension that was slowly inflating between them. 

“I don’t want to argue with you, Fenris,” Anders went on, daubing kisses along his nose between words. “Not when we have so little time.” 

“I’m sure we’ll be able to pick up where we leave off at some point,” Fenris said, trying to ignore the flutter of panic stirring to life in his stomach. “Or find a new subject to disagree on. We don’t seem to lack for those.” 

Anders took a short step back, his hands still resting on the sides of Fenris’s neck, and Fenris could see the sad smile on his face. “I thought that’s what I wanted, you know? Someone who would always agree with me, who felt my passions as their own. In a way, I _do_ have that, with Justice.” He saw the scowl that Fenris couldn’t hold back and hurried on, “But with other people – people who _aren’t_ a voice in your head – that would be terribly boring.” The smile widened, inching toward amusement or happiness but missing by a hairsbreadth. “You’ve never been boring, Fenris.” 

“Mage, why are you—” The words – _Why are you speaking as if this is the end?_ – evaporated on his tongue as the Gallows shook like a struck gong, a distant boom making the door to the dungeon bulge outward on its hinges, dust pluming through the cracks like smoke from a dragon’s nostrils. Fenris sprang away from the wall and out of Anders’s grasp, already reaching for his sword. 

“ _Venhedis_! Unless Cullen has taken to the use of _gaatlok_ , the Qunari have arrived. We were too late.” 

“Or the Qunari were too early,” Anders said, his head jerking upward as if his gaze could penetrate the layers of stone, plaster, and wood above them. “Where in Andraste’s arse is Cullen?” He started toward the door, hand reaching for the latch. 

Before his fingers closed around the iron pull, though, the door burst open and Cullen half-fell through it, catching himself on the doorjamb. 

“Hurry… the Qunari….” he gasped. “Maker, preserve us.” Wild-eyed, he turned and disappeared into the Gallows dungeon once more, boots thudding like a panicked heartbeat on the stone floor. Anders plunged through the doorway after him, and Fenris followed, more hesitant. Was he really going to help free dozens, if not hundreds, of mages? It seemed too late to be worrying about it, and yet his conscience needled at him. He had freed the runaway mages from slavers, but that had been because he still considered slavery a slightly greater evil than magic, and because he’d expected all of those mages to go back to the Circle or leave Kirkwall. Now, though, if Anders had his way, they’d all be free to do as they pleased until they were recaptured by templars elsewhere. 

They followed Cullen through a few dim, winding corridors and up flights of narrow stone steps until they reached the dungeon proper, a vast chamber divided into cells by thick iron bars. Bile churned in Fenris’s stomach, climbing up his throat and curdling on his tongue – the room looked not so different from the slaver pens he’d been kept in back in the Imperium or the ones he and Anders had rescued the young elf girl from on the day he’d killed Hadriana. The only difference was that the Gallows dungeon was cleaner… and far, far larger. In the haze of stone dust and smoke, Fenris could make out the huddled forms of the white-hooded mages, though instead of weeping, they were mostly eerily quiet. 

“The Qunari docked as I was gathering my men in the courtyard,” Cullen explained, breathless, as he worked on the huge iron padlocks with a heavy key. Anders, no doubt enjoying using magic in the one place in Kirkwall where it was most forbidden, began freezing the locks with well-placed bursts of ice and shattering them with a tap from his staff. 

Fenris lingered in the doorway, feet unwilling to step further into that room of cages. Anders gave him a confused glance, one eyebrow lifted. 

“Are you all right, Fenris? I doubt even these chunks of iron could stand up to your markings,” he said. A tiny smile tugged at his lips. “Go on then, start fisting.” 

Rolling his eyes, Fenris went to the nearest cage and activated his lyrium brands. A few of the mages within the cell let out frightened gasps, but Cullen seemed to take no notice, head bent over one of the locks, frowning as he laboriously twisted the key in the keyhole. 

“I have to get back to them as soon as possible,” Cullen muttered. “There will be a mutiny if I abandon them in the face of a Qunari invasion.” 

“Your duty is to the mages,” Anders said, voice like a blade cutting through the dense, dust-choked air. “I doubt you’re so irreplaceable that they’ll run around like headless chickens without you. Presumably they know which end of the sword to stick into the Qunari.” 

“But I am acting Knight-Commander,” Cullen insisted, wrenching a lock open and hurling it onto the floor in frustration. “I cannot just leave my men to be slaughtered.” 

“Then get a move on, take the mages to Orsino, and you can be back here to be spitted on one of those giant spears they throw around in no time,” Anders replied, sounding almost cheerful. 

“I would not wish to compound my error by entrusting their care entirely to the two of you,” Cullen said, though he gave Fenris a quick, apologetic glance. 

“No, you shouldn’t,” Anders said. “I’m an apostate, after all. Definitely not to be trusted.” He pulled open a cell and beckoned to the mages within. They wavered on their feet as they tried to walk out of their cage, sluggish and slow. “Maker, the blighted magebane! They can barely bloody walk, Cullen!” 

Somehow – mostly by Cullen’s direction – they arranged the mages into long, wobbling files, with the Tranquil placed at intervals so that they could support the dosed mages on the way out of the dungeon and through the tunnels. Progress was maddeningly slow – Fenris wished he could just activate his markings and try to frighten them into getting a move on. The ground trembled beneath them from time to time, as if settling after an earthquake, and that now-familiar, wild magic began to pull at the lyrium in his skin until he thought his flesh would pucker. The mages and apprentices must have been feeling it too – even through the stupor from the magebane, they raised their heads and cast awed glances upward. 

“Where are you taking us, Ser?” one of the young apprentices wailed at Cullen, tear stains making paler streaks through the dirt on her face. 

“To the First Enchanter,” Cullen replied, and even through the authority in his voice, Fenris could hear the hesitation, the doubt. “You will be safe with him until the battle is over, and then you will be sent to new Circles to continue your studies.” 

“But my mum lives in Kirkwall!” one high, childlike voice cried, and soon a chorus of frightened voices filled the cramped hallway like a flock of panicked birds. 

One voice, though, was louder than the rest, and the hint of thunder in it turned Fenris’s spine to ice. 

“They are not going to other Circles, Templar,” Anders said. “Our deal was if they fight the Qunari, they will be free.” 

“This is no time to argue over trivialities,” Cullen protested, and Fenris cringed at his tone, that almost haughty drawl that he knew would put Anders’s back up and no doubt lure Justice out even quicker. He glanced at Anders, looking for the telltale black threads of smoke rising from him, but he saw only the mage, glowering, of course, staff half-raised. 

“I don’t consider people’s lives – _mages’_ lives – to be trivial,” Anders said. “There will be no Circle in Kirkwall after this is done, and so they will be free to go where they choose, just as anyone else would when their home has been destroyed. You’re Fereldan. You should understand that.” 

“I cannot, in good conscience—” Cullen began. 

“Oh, fuck your conscience!” Anders shouted, drawing a few titters from the younger apprentices. “You killed whatever conscience you had the day you swore your oaths to the Order.” 

“I gave you my word that I would see the mages in my charge to safety.” Cullen’s gauntlet rattled on the pommel of his sword as his fist tightened around it. “Once they and the city are safe – once my men _make_ it safe – the mages and apprentices will be reassigned, and you, apostate, will be hanged.” He jerked his head up, as if trying to make himself taller, but his face had gone pale. “And if you do not come quietly, leave off with your damned cheek, and fulfill your side of our bargain now, you will face the Rite of Tranquility before you hang.” 

The arrival of Justice seemed to suck the air out of the corridor like an explosion. Fenris had never seen the spirit take control so quickly or so violently – it had always been like a pot on an open flame boiling over. But now, before the words had fully left Cullen’s lips, before Fenris could decide whether to hurl himself at the templar or try to protect Anders, Justice was in full possession of their shared body, glowing eyes, cracked skin, fists gloved in magic. The black filaments of smoke had thickened until they cloaked the mage, drawing the blue light he emanated into themselves and dimming the corridor. 

“You shall feel Justice’s burn, Templar!” Justice bellowed, drowning out the shrieks of the mages and apprentices. They surged forward, breaking around Cullen like whitewater around a boulder, and ran for the tunnels. 

Cullen had drawn his sword, though it wobbled back and forth in his grip. His face was bloodless white, the reddish rings under his eyes from the lyrium dark as fresh bruises. “Abomination!” he shouted, almost a yelp, the terror on his face matching that quavering in his voice. 

Fenris threw himself between Cullen and Anders, sword in hand, and he felt the concussion of the templar’s Smite tear at the lyrium in his markings as it passed through him to smash into Anders. The mage stumbled back, the light from Justice winking out, the glow from Fenris’s markings taking its place. Cullen advanced on them cautiously, eyeing the huge blade in Fenris’s hands but not giving Anders a second glance. Fenris wanted to spit him for his arrogance alone, but instead he just watched him narrowly, always keeping himself between the two. 

“You should go, Templar,” Fenris said. “Do your duty and take the mages to safety. But go.” 

“He is an abomination, elf. I have seen what destruction they can wreak. He must be killed. It is the only way.” Certainty began to gird Cullen’s voice – he had been on shifting ground before, but this was clear-cut to him, as it had once been to Fenris as well. 

Fenris turned enough to cast a quick glance toward Anders, while always keeping Cullen in his peripheral vision lest the man make a move. Anders had crumpled into a heap on the floor, pale and looking half-swallowed by the feathers on his coat. “He is no danger to anyone now.” He let the light in his markings flare brighter, bright enough to see fear and resolution battle on Cullen’s terrified face. “Go.” 

“You should leave Kirkwall when this is done,” Cullen said, his sword rattling as he tried to sheathe it. “If I see you after this, you will follow him to the hangman’s noose.” He blinked at Fenris’s sneer, but he turned and headed toward the tunnels, leaving Fenris alone with the still-unconscious Anders and the sound of fighting filtering down from above. 

He dropped to his knees beside Anders, thumbing open one eye to reveal red-webbed whites and a tiny crescent of dark gold. “Get up, mage,” he murmured, letting Anders’s eye fall shut and patting his clammy cheek with the back of his gauntlet. “We’re nearly there. I can carry you if I have to.” 

Not a flicker of response showed on the mage’s face. Above, Fenris could tell that the templars were losing ground, the clash of steel on steel being replaced by the sound of frantically running feet. With a sigh, he draped one of Anders’s arms over his shoulders and hoisted him to his feet. Anders’s head lolled against him, rolling on his limp neck. Maker knew what Cullen had done to him – in the Imperium, a templar who had used Smite on a mage, unless on the order of a magister, would have been a dead templar. Anders had hinted at such things before, at how templars could sever a mage’s connection to the Fade to stop them doing magic, but Fenris had had no idea it could be so violent or so damaging. He’d never wanted to press Anders on the issue, because the mage didn’t seem to care for speaking of it and because Anders was likely to accuse him of enjoying hearing the various ways mages could be kept subjugated. 

The mage’s feet dragged across the stone floor as Fenris half-carried him toward the entrance to the tunnels, limp as a doll. Even with the added weight of his staff, he wasn’t a heavy burden, more cumbersome than anything else with his long legs and broad shoulders, but it was still a relief when he began to bear more of his own weight. 

“Fenris?” Anders sounded half-awake; his voice had the soft, sleep-muddled tone it did when Fenris shook him from one of his dreams of the Archdemon. “What… what happened? I didn’t – Justice didn’t hurt anyone, did he?” 

“No,” Fenris replied. He propped the mage against the wall, letting him readjust to supporting himself. “Cullen did something – Smiting? – to you, and when he cut off your connection to the Fade, Justice went with it.” He ran his gaze over Anders’s face, looking for any small, hairline cracks in his skin, any glitter in his eyes. “He… he is not gone, is he?” 

Anders shook his head, scrubbing his face with his sleeve. “No, he’s still in here. It’ll take more than a Smite to get rid of him.” 

“Are you well enough to walk?” Fenris asked. “I can carry you if I must, but Cullen might be waiting for us – or we might run into some Qunari – and I’ll need my hands to wield my sword, since you cannot….” 

“I have to go back,” Anders murmured, raising his eyes slowly to meet Fenris’s. 

“What?” Fenris shouted, not caring for a moment if it drew the Qunari down on them. “Why in Maferath’s balls would you have to go back? The mages are free – or near enough – and we can sort that out with Cullen later. We have done what we came to do.” 

Anders gave him a pleading look, but Justice flickered in and out of his eyes and skin, fitful as a guttering candle. _Definitely not gone then_ , Fenris thought, a blend of disappointment and relief welling up inside him. “I promised Orsino I would destroy the phylacteries. I must. After all, what good is rescuing the mages if the templars can just use their bloody phylacteries to hunt them down again?” His adam’s apple bobbed in his throat as he swallowed, but his words still came out thick and clumsy when he spoke again. “I’m no use to you or the mages now anyway, not like this.” 

Fenris shoved his hand through his hair, hissing with annoyance when strands of it tangled in the joints of his gauntlets and pulled tight. From the direction of the dungeon, they heard the rolling drumbeat of Qunari voices, followed by the deeper, more percussive temblor of their footsteps. His stomach churned; he did not fear death – much, though perhaps more than he had before – but a Qunari charge could turn the bravest man’s bones to jelly. And to abandon Anders to that, without his magic? “I’ll go with you and watch your back. Cullen may be planning to kill both of us when this is over, but I know he will take the mages to Orsino.” 

“No, Fenris,” Anders said. He’d started shaking his head before Fenris had finished speaking, and the “no” was emphatic, a door slamming shut. “You must protect the mages. I’m useless now. Get them to Orsino. Keep them away from Cullen. I fear that seeing Justice’s display has brought back the old demons of Uldred’s Uprising for him.” He caught Fenris’s hand and brought it to his lips, his stubble tickling the lyrium etched into the palm. Fenris could feel the mage’s mouth curve against his hand, and when Anders looked up again, he was smiling, some of the old impishness glinting in his eyes. “You mustn’t worry about me, love. Orsino described exactly where the phylacteries are stored, and it’s well out of the way. Besides, I managed to escape from Kinloch Hold seven times; I think I can evade a few Qunari.” 

Fenris laughed, a short burst of a laugh that was more a release of nervous tension than amusement. “But you were caught six times.” 

“Being caught just made me that much better at escaping,” Anders replied smoothly, his smile never faltering, though Fenris thought he saw the mage’s lips quivering at the corners. He dropped another kiss into Fenris’s palm and folded Fenris’s fingers around it. “Go back to the mansion, gather our things, and wait for me there. We’ll be out of Kirkwall before Cullen is done scraping the remnants of his fellow templars off the pavement.” 

“Are you sure we’ll be allowed to leave?” Fenris asked, not wanting to invoke Justice’s name and draw the spirit forward again. 

Anders tilted his head to one side, as if listening for a far-off voice. “Yes. We will have freed Kirkwall’s mages. That’s what I – we, Justice and I – pledged to do when we got here.” He let out a soft, damp laugh that was followed by a sharp sniff. “I will miss the cats, though. Pity we can’t take them along.” 

“Meowedith can hunt enough to keep them all fed twenty times over,” Fenris said, smiling in spite of himself. “I’m sure the rest of Thedas isn’t lacking in cats that enjoy being fussed and cooed over by grown men. Though I suspect I’ll find one of ours hidden in your pockets.” He sighed. “I will do what you ask. I do not like it, but I will do it. But you must promise me that you _will_ come back.” 

“I can’t promise that, but I’ll try,” Anders replied. “Justice will have a say in it as well, of course.” 

Before Fenris could swallow down the bitterness that feeling anything but contempt for the spirit always brought out in him and respond, the door to the dungeon crashed open. The shouts of the Qunari rolled through the corridor like waves breaking on the shore. Anders scrambled to his feet – he hardly seemed to need the hand that Fenris offered him. For a moment, Fenris hesitated, clenching his fist as he toyed with the idea of driving it into Anders’s gut and carrying him off, phylacteries and promises to Orsino be damned. Though if he had to carry the mage, he doubted he could out-run the Qunari and their spears or the bolts of lightning from their Saarebas. 

He had almost decided on activating his markings when Anders lunged toward him, cupping Fenris’s face in his hands and kissing him. It was desperate, inelegant, so different from the usual expert kisses that he knew Anders prided himself on, too much shared panting breath and crushing together of noses, and yet he didn’t want it to end. 

But that end came all too soon, Anders pulling away, lips slick and shining, cheeks flushed, eyes fevered as his gaze skittered back and forth across Fenris’s face. “Go, love,” he breathed. “Be wary of Cullen, and keep the mages safe!” He plunged toward Fenris again and pressed another kiss to his lips – his cheeks were wet against Fenris’s, though Fenris couldn’t tell if it was sweat or tears. “Maker, keep yourself safe,” the mage mumbled as he pulled away, and then he was gone, a few gray feathers floating like cinders in the air where he’d been. 

Knees threatening to collapse beneath him, Fenris took a halting half-step in the direction of Anders’s receding footsteps, and then turned and ran back toward the entrance to the smugglers’ tunnels. 

  
Cullen had gathered the mages in one of the larger caverns in the tunnels and was standing guard with sword and shield at the ready as if a frightened flock of drugged mages and Tranquil posed any real threat to him or anyone else. He did not sheathe his sword when Fenris stumbled into the chamber, but relief did briefly loosen the tension on his face when he glanced past Fenris and saw that he was alone. 

“Where is the apostate?” he asked, catching Fenris by the shoulder. 

“Gone.” 

A sympathetic look – as unexpected as it was unwelcome – passed over Cullen’s face. “You made the right choice. There is no other option when dealing with abominations.” 

Fenris glared up at the templar and shrugged his hand off, but he didn’t bother to contradict him. It would make leaving Kirkwall easier if Cullen wasn’t dogging their heels to make good on his threats, and Fenris would have regretted killing him, his bluster about Tranquility and hanging aside. “The Qunari have breached the dungeon. We need to leave.” 

“Oh, Andraste!” Cullen breathed. He turned to the mages, some of his composure seeming to return, his posture back to its usual rigid straightness, his voice sharp. “On your feet! We must make haste! Quickly now!” 

Fenris watched the mages arrange themselves into their ragged lines, remembering the last time he’d led a group of mages out of danger. In both cases, he had the nagging suspicion that he wasn’t leading them to safety at all but merely to a different kind of peril. 

He took his position at the rear of the mages, sparing one last glance up at the entrance to the Gallows dungeons. The door was still hanging open, only smoky dimness beyond. He stared into the gloom until his eyes burned, willing a tall, long-limbed silhouette to appear. 

And then he felt a tug, as weak as a neap tide, at his markings. Magic, but not the hectic, swelling magic of the Saarebas. Familiar magic. Hope surged inside him, and he stumbled back toward the dungeon, fixed only on the doorway and that almost timid nudge of magic against the lyrium in his skin. He barely heard Cullen calling after him, barely heard his heavy footsteps in pursuit. Before Fenris reached the bottom of the stairs, Cullen caught him around the waist, lifting him off his feet, the momentum swinging them in an arc. 

“Maker take you, elf, what are you playing at?” Cullen demanded. 

Fenris struggled in his grasp – he was sure he was a match for the templar, but Cullen’s vambrace dug hard against his diaphragm and his grip was like iron. “Magic, I felt it. I have to go—” 

His words were swallowed by a tremendous rumble, like boulders tumbling down a mountainside. The cavern shook as if a giant had picked it up and was shaking it in its massive hands, and where the dungeon had been, a column of strange pink light shot skyward, its core white-hot. Fenris squeezed his eyes shut to shield them from its brilliance. A wind stronger than any he’d ever felt burst through the door, hurling both him and Cullen backward, and behind that wind, like thunder following the flash of lightning, came a roar that filled his ears until he thought his skull would burst open with it. It pinned him to the ground, spread-eagled, and he could only watch helplessly as a long, grasping arm of flame billowed into the cavern above him. 

Fenris should have tried to get up, tried to run from that brilliant pillar of fire that blazed and burned and showed no sign of dimming, but it was as if a bell jar had been lowered over him and flicked with a fingernail – all he could hear was a high-pitched ringing and there didn’t seem to be enough air to breathe. With effort, Fenris dragged himself onto his stomach, and in that disconnected quiet, he could see the mages, their screams silent from their open mouths, scrambling to their feet and running deeper into the tunnels; see Cullen, face blackened by ash, stagger toward the cavern to haul an injured mage up and throw the limp girl over his shoulder. 

_He lied to me_ , he thought, staring up at the specters of pink-tinged smoke writhing toward the ceiling of the cavern. Dirt, ash, and tiny flecks of stone rained down on him, settling on his face, catching in his eyelashes. He felt nothing, the old protective numbness coating him like dust on disused furniture, though it blanketed an empty shell. It had not been Qunari _gaatlok_ that had sparked that inferno – it had been magic. Fenris blinked, grit coating his eyelids, and in his mind’s eye, he saw Danarius’s laboratory, the volatile ingredients in their special storage. _Sela petrae. He was lying to you all along, you bloody fool. That potion was never meant to separate him from his demon_. 

Fenris opened his eyes, squinting against the bright, roaring flame of magic, and tried to pull himself up. He knew he should follow Cullen and the mages, but part of him wanted to walk into that churning torrent of fire, even though it would burn him to ash, to find the mage and drive his fist into his skull and pull out the blighted spirit or kill Anders in the attempt. Pain shot through him and collided with the anguish that had been brewing within him, filling the emptiness and setting his stomach churning. He felt something building inside him, and he couldn’t tell if it was a scream of rage, a torrent of sick, or a howling sob. 

The pink glow on the wall of the cavern winked out, leaving him in silent darkness. Whatever magic had been tugging at his markings – _Anders, it_ had _to be Anders_ – was gone as if it had never been, as if he’d just imagined it, and he was alone.


	31. Chapter 31

There was sky where there should not have been sky, angry as a bruise with clouds of smoke and dust made livid white at the edges by the rising sun. Anders blinked up at it, trying to remember why it was there and, more importantly, to puzzle out why it wasn’t the murky green sky of the Fade. There was sky where there should not have been sky, and – he realized as he twitched his fingers and toes, trying to work some feeling back into them – there was life where there should not have been life.

Worse, there was life where he did not want there to be life. Regret and grief gnawed at him, ravening mouths consuming him from the inside out like maggots feeding on a corpse. He had lied to Fenris, and now that the Gallows was a smoking pit, Fenris must have known and despised him for his selfishness, his weakness, his magic. _There is always going to be some reason, some excuse, why mages need to do this_ , he heard Fenris say, that deep voice that could be warm and dark as mulled wine turning to an angry, punishing rasp, bristling with contempt. Anders tried to drown out the memory with one from the day before – had it really only been one day? – Fenris breathing _I love you_ into his ear, the harshness that usually made his voice as spiky as his armor worn down to the soft, luxurious nap of velvet. 

Sobs rose in his throat, gagging, choking sobs, and Anders sank his teeth into his lower lip to hold them back, feeling his body shake with the effort. He ached all over – the bone-deep ache of sadness and the wrung-out ache of exhaustion from wielding too much magic for too long subsuming the expected physical pains of bruises and abrasions. His chest burned from inhaled ash and those heaving, swallowed-down sobs; his eyes streamed from the same. He wished he could remember – that Justice or fever or both hadn’t stolen from him – the days when Fenris had nursed him through his strange illness. If he could, he would be able to imagine Fenris there with him now, unexpectedly gentle hands binding his wounds and pushing the singed hair from his forehead. 

But as far as he could tell, he was the only one left alive on the smoldering ruin of the Gallows. And even if he somehow found his way back to the mansion in Hightown with its corpses in the foyer, mushrooms in the carpet, and lovingly offered dead birds on the pillow, Fenris would never touch him again anyway. Or not in kindness, at least. Having a fist phased through your ribcage to pull out your heart did involve _some_ contact, he supposed. 

Without thinking, he reached out for Fenris… or Fenris’s markings, the well of mana he carried with him. The elf would’ve bridled at being reduced to that, but Anders had not thought of them that way for months – now the lyrium was not a tool for him to use, but an assurance. But he felt nothing, perhaps because his own mana was drained, his connection to the Fade as thready as a waning pulse, or because Fenris was too far away, too deep beneath water and earth and bedrock. _Not dead_ , he thought. _Maker, please, not dead_. 

He thought he saw birds flying in slow, lazy circles among the clouds, but as the last of the milky blue, glasslike surface of his barrier sputtered out of existence, he realized that the birds were really fluttering bits of cloth, charred but still recognizably the red of the banners that had hung in the Gallows Courtyard. Without the protection of the barrier, small pieces of rubble pelted down on him like hail, coating him in stone dust. 

“I suppose I should thank you for that,” he said to Justice. Another disappointment – not only was he not dead and in the Fade, but he had hoped that in the Fade, back in his home, Justice would finally have been able to leave him and be free. On the other hand, he wasn’t as alone as he’d thought, and there was some comfort in that. “Though they taught us in the Circle that a demon will act to protect its host. It should have occurred to me to ask before, I’m sure, but how does this make you different from a demon?” He pressed his fingers briefly to the old scar above his heart, then let his hand rest limply on his chest. It hurt too much to let his arm drop back to his side and took too much energy besides. 

_The difference between spirits and demons is one of motivation_ , Justice replied, his voice a low complaint of thunder heard from far away. _My motivation is to protect you – my host, my friend – because you have a mortal body that is fragile. A demon’s motivation would be to protect you so they can continue to work their mischief in this world in your body._

“Blowing up an entire fortress doesn’t qualify as mischief?” Anders asked. Destroying a Circle would have appealed to him even before he’d met Justice, though – as Justice had said – it was a question of motivation, albeit of a different kind. The man he’d used to be would have been happy to rain fireballs down on every templar in creation, but he’d lacked the motivation for it. Or, rather, his only motivation for anything he’d done had been to protect himself. Maker, his head hurt. 

Justice had lapsed into an affronted silence, which Anders supposed was fair. He pulled himself to his feet, staggering when his ankles turned on the chunks of rubble beneath his boots, and tried to get his bearings. He’d managed to slip past the Qunari and make it to Orsino’s office to cast the spell, but all that remained of Templar Hall now were piles of crumbled white stone, streaked with soot, and tangled, twisted webs of half-melted portcullises. The First Enchanter had done a fine job of distributing the potion – most of the fortress was gone, like a sandcastle that had been mostly washed away by waves. 

From where Anders stood, he could see the bay and across it Kirkwall – through the veil of thick, gray smoke, it was as if he were looking back at it from the Fade. The docks roiled with activity like a kicked anthill. He could see people pointing toward what was left of the Gallows, others hustling onto small crafts to set out for the island. Maybe they were hoping to corral the mangled golden statues that now lay half-submerged in the waters of the bay and drag them back to Kirkwall to be melted down, for Anders doubted they were attempting a rescue mission. Seeing the Knight-Commander’s disembodied golden head bouncing on the choppy waves almost brought a smile to his face – the effigy’s head was clearly as hollow as the real thing. 

His own head felt hollow too, except for the persistent ringing in his ears that not even Justice’s convenient barrier had been able to protect him from. He stood for a moment, trying to be still though he felt as if he were standing on the deck of a ship, waiting for his equilibrium to come back and waiting for the ringing to be replaced by the sound of the wind that stirred the hair from his forehead and brushed the stone dust from his coat or the slap of the waves against the rocks below, beneath the destruction. When sound did return to him, though, it was not in the shrieks of seagulls or the shouts of men on the docks – it was in the gasp, a harsh intake of breath, that Fenris had released after Anders had kissed him for the last time. It played and replayed in his head until he memorized every quiver in it, the shock, the fear. 

He kicked a chunk of rubble and watched it skitter down the pile of debris in that strange empty yet ringing silence. _Why should he have been surprised?_ Anders wondered. _He said himself that my entire being is a warning. I’m a mage – all I could ever do was hurt him._ He should have been more angry with himself for having that thought, but he couldn’t. Perhaps he hadn’t set out to hurt Fenris the way Hadriana had, or hurt Fenris as a means of gaining power as Danarius had, but accepting the love of a mage – and even, maybe, returning it – had forced Fenris to be more vulnerable than he would have been with anyone else. _I can’t blame myself for_ that, he told himself. 

_Can’t I, though? He only loves me because I was always around and was mostly kind to him._ The necessity of that “mostly” sent a prickle of shame through him, heating his cheeks. _And it wasn’t as if he knew any better._ That brought on another wave of shame – both for the underlying implication that Fenris couldn’t make his own decisions and didn’t know his own mind, and the fact that Anders had taken advantage of him. Loving anyone was a bit like walking into a storm, but for Fenris loving a mage would’ve been like going stark bollock naked into a blizzard, and Anders had all but beckoned to him from the safety of a warm house with the promise of a hot bath and a goblet of spiced wine. 

As if a desire demon had been listening to his thoughts, the gasp echoing in his mind changed to Fenris’s voice, hesitant but still resonant with that depth that Anders felt vibrating in his own chest when he embraced the elf, murmuring, _I love you_. Anders tasted Fenris’s clean, faintly sour sweat on his lips – he’d been kissing Fenris when he’d said it, and he’d paused, frozen as if with fright, a shiver of mingled delight and apprehension running down his spine like a cool fingertip. He didn’t doubt the truth of it – Fenris said little, and he wouldn’t have wasted any of those words on lies, particularly not lies designed to ingratiate himself to Anders, not when he knew all too well – because Anders had made it embarrassingly, pathetically clear – that there was no need to do so. 

Though was that not the double-edged sword of loving and wanting to be loved in return? He always longed to hear those words, would lie awake at night thinking of how they might sound, when they might be said – would they be sleepily whispered into his ear or cried out insensibly at the peak of ecstasy like a heroine in a _Swords & Shields_ novel? Anders himself tended to just blurt them out when the mood took him the way he did with all of his other words, but he assumed that others would have more care about it. And as much as he wished and waited to hear those words, he was far more comfortable with being the one to say them, because – Justice’s interjections, opinions, and interference aside – when he was in control of it, he knew his own mind in a way he could never fully know another’s. After all, hadn’t Karl changed his mind? Hadn’t Anders’s mother let him be dragged off in chains after twelve years of “I love yous”? He could trust himself in that, at least, if in nothing else. 

But there was no point in thinking about any of that now, he told himself, trying to drown out the memory of Fenris’s voice. He had to get back to Kirkwall, but then what? Neither he nor Justice had planned for anything beyond the explosion, which made Justice’s barrier that much more baffling. Unless Anders himself had thrown it up unconsciously to save a life suddenly worth saving? He had had doubts up until the moment that he activated the potion. As he’d watched Fenris run away from him toward the tunnels, only the chilly gleam of his hair and the glitter of the lyrium on the backs of his arms visible in the gloom until they too were enveloped, he’d wanted to shout, “Don’t leave me behind!” at the elf’s retreating back and hurry after him, even though he’d chosen to be left behind. Or Justice had chosen for him. He was no longer as certain as he’d once been that the two were the same thing. 

He slid down a slanted piece of white stone that once could have been the wall of a mage’s cell and gingerly picked his way through more jagged stone slabs, over tiles that were miraculously in one piece but were slick with blood. Kirkwall’s ever-present fleet of flies had already arrived, swarming busily around the stump of a Qunari horn, meat and bone of scalp and skull still clinging to it, while others made a seething black sabaton for a templar’s boot with most of a foot still inside it. The Gallows Courtyard was mostly intact, if strewn with the scorched and splintered remains of the merchants’ stalls and carts. Though he’d argued with Fenris about saving the Tranquil, a wave of relief still swept over Anders to find none of their bodies there, staring at the sky with eyes as blank and glassy in death as they’d been in life. 

It was strange, what had survived the blast and what hadn’t. Several of the enormous weeping slave statues had melted into brassy puddles blotching the pale stone of the courtyard, while tiny vials of potions remained intact on the shelves of the Formari herbalist’s stall. He snatched up a healing potion and downed it, feeling the itch of his wounds knitting together. A few lyrium potions remained unbroken – he would’ve drunk one of them first and healed himself, but the idea of doing magic out in the open in the Gallows still seemed too much of a risk, even though anyone who might have noticed or cared was dead. 

The slightly singed smell of lyrium from the potions that had shattered on the paving stones rose to his nostrils, and he nearly gagged. The last time he’d smelled that odor was after Fenris had disappeared down the corridor toward the tunnels, when he’d taken his last vial of lyrium from his pouch and gulped it down. Would he ever be able to drink it again and not taste the sourness of lies on his tongue? He could have miraculously found the potion, swallowed it, and gone back with Fenris to lead the mages out of the tunnels, leaving the templars and the Qunari to destroy one another. Surely a few Saarebas could have done what his bomb had. But no, he’d had to be sure. Justice had had to be sure. A blow had to be struck for the mages by a mage. Though the Maker alone knew if anyone would realize that that had been the case. The Chantry would most likely be gagging to pin it on the Qunari and get the donations flowing back into their dwindling coffers. 

“Pointless, ill-conceived, and idiotic,” Anders muttered. “Just like Irving always used to tell me when they dragged me back to the Tower.” He glanced around the ruined courtyard, past the columns toward the pier. No deserted ferry waited there, bobbing on the waves. Behind him was the Gallows, collapsed on itself, the entrance to the dungeons and the smuggling tunnels buried under tons of mortar and stone. “Maybe I should write ‘I did it’ on a piece of parchment, pin it to my coat, and wait to starve to death and hope that someone finds my corpse.” 

Justice was ignoring him, having retreated into a silence that seemed sulky. Why would a spirit of Justice know anything about strategy? From what Anders could tell, war – and the mages of Thedas _were_ at war – required adaptability and quick-thinking. Between the two of them, they had unshakeable conviction, albeit of a rigid, right-and-wrong variety, and impulsiveness. And charm, of course, though templars seemed to be immune to that. Not that he would have expected anything different from people who enjoyed fucking Tranquil. 

He walked back toward the main Gallows Courtyard, ears straining for the sound of his own footsteps over the ringing in his ears. A few of the crying slave statues still clung to their columns, the ones closer to the pier. He wondered what Fenris must have made of them the first time he’d seen them – statues of slaves that had been repurposed to represent mages. The elf had seemed oddly vehement in his defense of the Tranquil – perhaps he could recognize them as being like slaves simply by virtue of their not having magic. Fenris’s fear and hatred of mages were so tightly intertwined as to be indistinguishable from one another, one stoking the other so that they were still white-hot in intensity. 

What if this tipped him back over to the templars’ side – or Cullen’s side, Anders supposed it was now, as he nudged the severed, helmeted head of a templar out of his way with his boot – and Fenris turned on the mages that he’d so recently helped to escape? And it would all be Anders’s fault, his betrayal that would ignite Fenris’s need for vengeance. He understood that need – he very nearly embodied that need – but the idea that the Circle mages would suffer for what he had done set Justice to grumbling. 

The thought that he could inspire that much hatred in Fenris now after everything made his throat tighten, to hold back more sobs or vomit, he couldn’t be sure. He knew he’d had to take the opportunity when it had arisen, but it seemed such a sick twist of fate – Andraste’s revenge on him for constantly invoking her knickerweasels, perhaps? – that it should have come so soon after Fenris had not just voiced his love but had given himself to Anders, had shown him that he trusted Anders with his body as well as his heart. 

_I bloody told him I didn’t deserve him_ , he thought, and on its heels treaded shame, shame at being glad he had gotten the chance to have Fenris the way he’d dreamt of for months before he’d had to carry out his and Justice’s plan. _It might be the last bit of happiness I ever have_ , he told himself petulantly. But to have had it and know that it would never happen again? To have the memory of Fenris arching against him, of Fenris around him, of being able to feel the flutter of the elf’s pulse everywhere – would he have traded all of that for ignorance? 

But worst of all was that he had thought himself an exception to Fenris’s misguided beliefs about mages – more than that, he’d wanted to prove to Fenris that Danarius was the exception, that most mages were no worse than other people. Now all of that was ruined, and he’d proven himself to be a liar and a murderer just as Fenris had always suspected. 

Anders tried to swallow down the thickness in his throat and scrubbed the cuffs of his coat over his streaming eyes. He’d reached the end of the pier where the waves lapped at the stone. Trying to ignore the disembodied limbs mapped with vitaar and bloody scraps of templar uniforms bobbing on the water, he looked across the bay toward Kirkwall. The smoke from the Gallows had drifted over the city and, lit by the rising sun, enveloped it in a lowering red haze that reminded him of the stories his father had told of the winter dust storms in the Anderfels that engulfed whole villages for weeks at a time. Every now and then, he could see a flare of sparks shooting up through the gloom from one of the Lowtown foundries, but the smoke closed in again immediately like spilled ink blotting out words on a page. There was a finality to it – Kirkwall and all of its inhabitants, the ones he’d healed, the one he loved, were lost to him now. 

And yet a tide of hope swelled in him when the silhouette of a boat sliced through the veils of smoke as it headed for the Gallows. That surge of hope receded all too quickly, though – he didn’t deserve it any more than he’d deserved Fenris’s trust. Still, he squinted at the little pinnace, its oars churning the water, his eyes straining to make out its passengers. No sunlight glinted off of Silverite polished fanatically to a brilliant shine every morning – whoever those indistinct shapes were, they were not templars. 

One of the figures must have caught sight of him, silhouetted by the pale, settling dust of the ruined Gallows, and it rose, pointing with a large hand. _Qunari_. As the boat drew closer, he could make out the horns, the dull gleam of silvery-gray skin and – he noticed with a plummeting of his stomach to about boot-level – thick golden chains. They had a Saarebas. He might have been able to take on a _karataam_ without a Saarebas, if Justice felt threatened enough to take charge, even with his depleted mana, but he had felt those massive surges of magic from the Saarebas before – he would be a greasy scorchmark on the white stone of the Gallows pier in the blink of an eye. So he could play a futile game of hide-and-seek with the Qunari until they killed him out of sheer annoyance or he could give himself up and hope for a tense ride back to the mainland. Throwing himself into the bay and swimming back to Kirkwall was not an option – he would rather have chugged an entire chalice of Darkspawn blood, as Oghren had at their Joining, than risk swallowing a drop of the water in that bay. 

He raised his arms above his head and waved them, calling out in a voice he hoped sounded appropriately panicked, “Help! Over here!” 

Anders scrambled up the stone steps as the boat drew up to the pier, wanting to put some space between himself and the Qunari in case he had to run. Though run to where, he couldn’t say. He had an absurd vision of himself shinnying up onto one of the remaining slave statues and the Qunari trying to prod him down with one of their spears, like the time the Viscount of Catwall had somehow climbed onto one of the mansion’s dusty chandeliers, and Anders had found Fenris poking at the unfortunate cat with the end of his staff. Something in his heart clenched at the memory, and his fingers twitched as he reached out for the Fade. Fenris had told him that the Qunari would likely kill a mage on sight – all it would take was one fire ball…. 

But then the connection was severed, snapping back as Justice seized control of it. The spirit seemed to know better than to take over their shared body completely – Anders wasn’t a passenger in his own mind, and no blue cracks fissured his hands – but it appeared that Justice wasn’t going to let him be free that easily. He was oddly similar to Fenris that way, Anders thought, again feeling that tightness in his chest at the mere thought of the elf, even though Fenris would have hated the comparison. No one else he cared for or respected had ever held him responsible for his behavior the way Justice and Fenris had – not First Enchanter Irving, not Karl, not even the Warden Commander. Nathaniel had made the occasional sour criticism, but there was no accountability – it was always “Oh, that incorrigible Anders! What’s to be done with him?” Anders supposed he’d worn them down through sheer annoyance, though even so, Fenris and Justice had been the only two to ever question his motivations and make him question them himself. 

Still, it was the old Anders he called upon now, putting on his former self like an outgrown set of robes, the cheerful-seeming Anders who had stood over the flaming corpses of Darkspawn, fingertips still smoking, and said, “I didn’t do it” to the Warden Commander. He watched the Qunari haul their boat onto the piling, formulating his story in his mind over the disgusted protestations of Justice. “You have to work with me,” he murmured to Justice in his head. “No matter what is said or what happens, you cannot take me over. They see you, they’ll have their Saarebas blast me into pieces, and I don’t think even you could fix that.” The scorched feathers of his pauldron pricked his fingertips as he brushed them over the scar above his heart. 

_You act as if it is_ my _control that is the problem_ , Justice grumbled in response. Anders frowned – surely it had been the spirit directing their shared body when they’d faced templars and slavers, dealing death more swiftly and efficiently than Anders himself could ever have on his own. _I will do as you ask_ , Justice said, _but you must not call upon me._

“I’ll… try,” Anders replied, his own voice in his head sounding confused. He hoped that assuming the outward air of his former self would help – that Anders kept all of his anger deeply and safely buried, or so he’d believed. 

He tried not to look too closely at the Qunari mage at the rear of the small party that now approached him; the sight of the chains, blinkered eyes, heavy collar, and sewn-together lips would only inflame Justice and his own anger. Or the latter followed by the former, if Justice was to be believed. He forced a nervous smile onto this face and called out, “Shanedan,” trying to remember how Fenris had pronounced it while simultaneously ignoring the twinge of pain at hearing the elf’s voice even just in memory. “Thank the Maker, you’ve come!” he babbled on, recognizing the idiocy of mentioning the Maker to a group of Qunari but deciding it was part of the clueless innocent act. “I thought I would be trapped out here forever.” 

The Qunari exchanged unreadable looks, their faces becoming more stern, if that were possible. Up until the death of Viscount Dumar, most of the Qunari had stayed in their compound at the docks, and Anders doubted if more than a handful of them could speak the common tongue, even after several years in Kirkwall. Finally, in a voice that sounded like stone being cracked open with a pickaxe, one of them asked, “What has happened here, human?” 

“I can’t say really,” Anders said, trying to shift between fear, respect, surprise, and harmless innocence in his voice. “I was shuttering my stall for the night – I’m a merchant, or I _was_ , since the stall is in matchsticks now – when the fighting broke out. I hid, and then there was a huge explosion, and I think I must have passed out, because when I came to, it was like this and everyone was dead.” He was talking too quickly, judging by the annoyed confusion on the faces of the Qunari, and he took a deep breath, bowing his head and hoping that they thought he was overcome. “Oh, Andraste, I suppose this means everyone in the Gallows is gone! Marker preserve me!” he cried, gulping the words as if trying to swallow down sobs. 

The Qunari seemed unmoved by his histrionics and turned away to confer with each other. Anders thought he heard the word “Arishok” a few times among the rest of the unintelligible muttering. Finally, the Qunari who had spoken to him turned back and said, “You will come with us.” 

“You’ll take me back to Kirkwall? Thank you, uh, serah!” 

“The Arishok will want to question you as to what happened here. This is the work of some _bas_ , and he will want to know how it came to pass,” the Qunari replied. 

Well, it had been too good to be true, Anders told himself before realizing that perhaps he was getting too carried away with his own performance – after all, did he really _want_ to go back to Kirkwall? If the Qunari had been offering him passage to Amaranthine, maybe he would have been eager, but he thought – and hoped that Justice would agree – that his work was done in Kirkwall. The mages were free, the Gallows was destroyed, and surely the Chantry would be helpless without its army of lyrium-addicted goons to do its bidding and with the majority of its flock being held hostage by the Qunari. And Fenris… well, Anders had always been good at breaking what he loved most, so he supposed that counted as a job well done too. Still, he couldn’t stay on the smoking ruin of the Gallows, so if getting off the island meant a chat with the Arishok, so be it. 

“I don’t know what help I can be, but I’ll try,” he said, trying to sound as ingratiating as he could manage. “I’d like to get home to my family, though. They must be worried about me.” There was that stab of pain again, like a splinter jabbing the tender flesh under a fingernail. 

The Qunari murmured a few words Anders didn’t understand to one of his companions, and another stepped forward and propelled Anders toward the boat with a few rough nudges to the shoulder. He almost muttered thanks to the Maker for them not binding his hands – Justice would not have reacted well to that, agreement or no. His guard shoved him onto one of the plank seats of the boat and loomed over him in silence while the rest of the Qunari searched the rubble. The old Anders would have tried to make conversation – or, worse, have flirted – but now he just sat there, hoping he didn’t look like a mage. Or like he was possessed. Or like a possessed mage who had just blown up a fortress in which more than a few of his guard’s countrymen had been fighting. 

Just as Anders had expected, the other Qunari returned empty-handed, no injured added to their numbers. He soon found himself flanked by two of them, rounding his shoulders to give them more room, and they cast off for the docks. The Saarebas was behind him, in the stern of the boat with its… Anders wasn’t sure what to call the other Qunari who watched the Saarebas as closely as a templar watched a Circle mage and gripped a strange golden rod as if it were a weapon. But no, he realized, his stomach twisting, the rod wasn’t the weapon – the _Saarebas_ was. Perhaps Cullen had more in common with his Qunari adversaries than he believed, Anders thought, biting back a smirk and ignoring Justice’s angry grumbling. The spirit had honored their agreement so far, but he was complaining like Fenris in a fish guttery. 

How long would it be before thinking of the elf no longer felt like a peppering of arrows to the chest? Not any time soon, he knew, but perhaps some day he’d be staggering up a slope in the Frostbacks and realize that the snow was just snow and didn’t remind him of the pale sheen of Fenris’s hair anymore, or he’d bite into an apple and not think of the elf’s soft hum of pleasure when he would lick the juice of one from his lips. It was different with Karl – Karl hadn’t been Karl anymore when he’d died, and the romance had long been over between them. He still regretted having failed Karl in the end, but he hadn’t been responsible for his fate either. With Fenris, though, he didn’t have that to console him – this time, he’d ruined everything himself. Well, he and Justice had.


	32. Chapter 32

When they drew up to the dock in Kirkwall, one of the Qunari hauled Anders up by the arm and tossed him over the side of the boat like a child throwing away an unwanted doll. He slipped on the slick, sea-wet stone step, water sloshing over the toes of his boots and soaking through the holes in them. As if the climb up to the Viscount’s Keep, trying to hold Justice at bay and not tip off his captors to what he really was, weren’t going to be bad enough, now he had to do it in wet boots, squelching with every step. It was the sort of thing that would have annoyed the life out of Fenris – if he’d worn shoes, of course. The elf was always so finicky about such things – Anders couldn’t help but smile at the memory of the faces he pulled when they walked through the narrow passages of Darktown and had to skirt around piles of mess, animal and human. Being able to smile about it was progress, he supposed, if only because it kept him from crumpling into a heap at the feet of the bewildered Qunari.

Not that his captors would have let him stay in a quivering ball of self-pity for very long – one of them was already nudging him between the shoulder blades with the butt of his spear to propel him up the stone steps of the dock and toward the wide avenue where the Qunari compound had so recently been. Anders let himself be pushed, though his heels dragged on the dusty white stone – Maker knew he didn’t have motivation enough of his own to carry him forward anymore, and with Justice quiet, he wouldn’t be getting much help from that direction. Up ahead, at the base of the stairs that led up to Hightown stood a knot of Qunari, at its center a tall – or _taller_ , Anders supposed – Qunari with an enormous candelabrum of horns, red armored pauldrons that made him look as broad across the shoulders as Anders was tall, and a glowering expression that made the other Qunari seem like they were grinning. 

_The Arishok_ , Anders thought. Fenris had mentioned seeing the leader of the Qunari in Kirkwall when out in Hightown, but Anders had preferred to stay in the mansion during the days after the templars had raided his clinic, and it seemed that even the military leader of the Qunari knew better than to wander Kirkwall’s streets after dark. Still, the Qunari had an air of authority to him that had nothing to do with his stature. 

The Arishok gave Anders a dismissive up-and-down glance as he came forward, one that Anders would have directed toward a particularly useless-looking beetle, and began to question one of the warriors with the Gallows party. Anders stared down at his boots and the small puddle of rank seawater seeping from them, and tried to look abashed and not at all like he was eavesdropping. Not that he could understand most of what they were saying, apart from _bas_ and _bas-Saarebas_. So they were talking about him, and about the mages they’d attacked the Gallows to destroy in the first place. As much as he regretted that blowing up the Gallows had almost certainly lost him Fenris, he couldn’t completely be sorry that he’d done it, since so many templars and Qunari had gone up with the fortress. The loss of the Qunari mages was unfortunate, but from what Fenris had told him, the Saarebas would rather be dead than be free. He bit down hard on the inside of his lower lip and hoped that any Qunari who noticed his shoulders shaking would think it was out of fear. 

“How did you come to survive this calamity, _bas_?” 

It took a moment for Anders to realize that the resonant voice, like a booming drum being struck in a cave, was addressing him. He glanced up quickly, found himself staring into the murky steel-gray of the Arishok’s eyes, and looked back down at his boots. There was a strange, seething light in the Qunari’s eyes, like lightning just sparking alight in the belly of a dark storm cloud. 

“I—I don’t know, uh, Messere Arishok,” he stammered. The stuttering was only partly an act – that stern gaze seemed to drive right into the top of his skull and see his thoughts. Even if his act had struck a blow against their common enemy, Anders doubted the Arishok would thank him. His tongue tripped over itself as he tried to force out the lie about being a merchant in the Gallows Courtyard. 

Midway through his litany of ignorance and disavowal, a terrible grinding filled the air, drowning out his voice with the squeal and groan of metal on metal. It sounded like a Fenris the size of a high dragon scraping his finger-guards together, that grating metallic rasp that made the hair on Anders’s arms stand up, only so loud that he clapped his hands over his ears, heedless of the threat the Qunari might see in any sudden movements. A minute, annoyed flicker of an eyelid was the Arishok’s only reaction, at least that Anders saw before he swung around, knocking the spear butt still nudging his back out of the way, and looked out over the water. 

Huge chains, their links as thick around as a man, were rising from the churning green water of the bay, two umbilici connecting the enormous Twins of Kirkwall at the mouth of the harbor to the mainland. Debris from the Gallows bounced on the waves as the chains displaced water and set the bay rocking, and the ships and boats tethered at the docks seemed to crowd together like spooked sheep huddling in a paddock, edging nervously away from a wolf at the gate. 

“Maker’s arse,” Anders breathed. That tiny hint of surprise on the Arishok’s face had told him that this was not the work of the Qunari. Between the apparent slaughter of Cullen’s party the night before, the fight at and destruction of the Gallows, and the honor guard taken to Val Royeaux, the templars must have been a non-entity in Kirkwall – something that Anders never would have believed possible. Could the City Guard finally have been living up to its name and actually been guarding the city? 

_I should run_ , Anders thought, realizing too late that he was asking Justice’s permission more than anything. 

_That would be unwise_ , the spirit replied. _It would make you appear guilty, and they would give chase. I would be forced to defend you, in spite of what I promised_. 

Anders swallowed a sigh. _Because no human would ever be terrified by dozens of enormous, well-armed Qunari_ , he snapped back at Justice, but there was no real heat in it. The spirit was right, and it seemed a waste to let all the effort and mana Justice had put forth to save them from the explosion be for nothing and have Anders end spitted on the point of a Qunari spear. 

When he looked back at the Arishok, the Qunari’s face seemed hewn from granite. Over the sloshing and slapping of the bay against the docks, the Arishok exchanged some muttered Qunlat with one of his lieutenants before saying in the common tongue, “We will return to the Keep. I will finish questioning this _bas_ there.” 

“No, please,” Anders cried, distantly impressed at how desperate he sounded. “I need to find my family and let them know I’m well. Please—” 

A curt swipe of the Arishok’s massive, clawed hand through the air cut off his words as effectively as a punch to the throat. “ _Parshaara, basra_ ,” he ordered, and Anders could hear a strain in it, a gritting together of teeth. Though he didn’t recognize anything other than “ _bas_ ”, the Qunari’s meaning was clear enough. 

The Arishok’s words were punctuated by distant bursts of _gaatlok_ , and puffs of black smoke ballooned up from the pale towers and turrets of Hightown and drifted out in long dark fingers to join the cloud from the Gallows that still lingered over the harbor. 

“ _Vashedan_ ,” the Arishok muttered, voice now a growl, and the meaning of that was all too clear as well. He had obviously not been expecting this much resistance, even though Anders couldn’t say it was an entirely organized resistance, since the most stunning blow – his own destruction of the Gallows – hadn’t even been aimed at the Qunari and had been carried out by two mages and an unwitting elf. 

“If this _bas_ does not come willingly, carry him,” the Arishok commanded, using the common tongue clearly for Anders’s benefit, and turned on his heel to stalk toward the staircase that led to Hightown. 

Another rap from the spear butt between his shoulder blades got Anders moving, and he followed, head bowed, watching his feet plod up the steps and trying to keep pace with the Qunari. A voice in his head was screaming at him not to let himself be taken again, and he found that he could no longer tell if it was Justice’s voice or his own. What would Justice know of being a prisoner, though? Unless he’d considered the corpse he’d inhabited for all those months a prison. If so, it had been a prison of his own choosing. 

Why was the Arishok even bothering with him? Of course, there was some novelty to be found in someone who was the only survivor of an inexplicable disaster, but how many “I don’t know” repetitions would it take for the Arishok to release him? Would he even _be_ released? Fear trickled down his spine, cold and clammy. What if they sent him off to the Viddathlok for conversion or, if he was unwilling, a dose of _qamek_? How many times would he escape slavery – as he thought the word, he could almost hear Fenris’s snarl of disagreement – only to find himself bound in a new kind of slavery? 

Though he kept his eyes lowered, Anders could smell the change in the air as they ascended, the fish stench of the docks giving way to the piss and molten-metal odor of Lowtown, which in turn yielded to the smell of _gaatlok_ as they neared Hightown, its acrid pungency overwhelming the usual faint balsam and sea-air fragrance of the district. A quiver shuddered to life in the pit of his stomach, half-giddiness, half-nausea, that had nothing to do with the clash of metal ringing in the streets, the cries of dying men, or his impending audience with the Arishok. 

It was Fenris, knowing that Fenris was nearby, that maybe if Anders shouted his name loud enough, the elf would hear him over the din of the fighting and come running, ready to hack Anders’s captors to pieces with his huge sword. Or, more likely, he’d lop Anders’s head off with one blow and save the Arishok from wasting valuable time on an interrogation. If Fenris was alive, of course. Anders would have welcomed the bite of a Fenris’s blade into his throat as long as he saw that the elf was well enough to swing it. 

As they passed the long-abandoned Amell estate, its pale stone walls rashed over with ivy, a flash of white on one of the rooftops caught Anders’s eye, shining in the bruised, smoke-hazy sunlight. He would have thought it light glancing off of armor, though what kind of preening tit wore white armor? He opened his mouth to give a warning but then snapped it shut again. Neither side deserved his help, and he felt curiously disinterested in the outcome – whoever was on the rooftops was undoubtedly fighting for either Kirkwall or the Chantry, and both meant less than nothing to him now. If he survived any attack, perhaps he could escape in the ensuing confusion. And if he was killed, well, that was basically all he wanted now anyway, wasn’t it? 

A rain of arrows, thick as a summer thunderstorm, plummeted down from the rooftops. Before Anders could react, he found himself shunted aside as Justice tapped into the Fade and threw up a barrier around him – the spirit had to know it meant certain death if any of the Qunari survived, but he supposed old habits died hard, even for Fade spirits. Through the shimmering blue of the shield, Anders watched several of the Qunari fall in the immediate onslaught, but then the ferocious torrent of the Saarebas’s magic was undammed, silvery bolts of lightning striking the rooftops opposite, chunks of masonry bursting from the walls and falling into the square below, so heavy that they knocked the paving stones askew as they smashed to the ground. Screams of fear were cut short by those forks of electricity – their targets blown apart by magic before the cries had fully left the victims’ throats. Something flew in a high arc from the rooftop and landed at Anders’s feet with a clang – a white-enameled belt buckle in the shape of Andraste’s face, eye holes still smoking. 

Nearly as suddenly as it had begun, the ambush was over. Justice let the barrier wink out, but one of the Qunari, one of those who carried the long golden rod that somehow controlled a Saarebas, was already pointing at him with an outstretched, trembling hand, his eyes wide with horror. 

“You are _bas Saarebas_?” the Qunari shouted before turning to the other survivors. “ _Nehraa sataa karasaam_!” 

Justice scrabbled for Anders’s connection to the Fade once more, ready to hurl another barrier into place, though his mana was already depleted again – the lyrium potion he’d gulped down in the Gallows Courtyard an insufficient bandage for a gaping wound. How long would a barrier last against a Saarebas attack anyway? Maintaining a shield while moving was even more taxing, so he would just stand there stupidly behind his barrier until his mana was sapped and the Qunari finished him off with their spears. 

“Wait!” he cried, raising his arms, palms up, in what he hoped was a placating gesture, though he realized too late it might appear threatening coming from a mage. The crackling purple-blue glow of electricity magic already enveloped the Saarebas’s fists, and Anders cast about wildly for something – anything – to stall. From the corner of his eye, he saw the massive, crumpled forms of fallen Qunari, one of them in armor as bright as freshly spilled blood. _The Arishok_. 

Anders dared a quick glance at him, fast enough to see the arrow piercing the Arishok’s neck, fletched with feathers as white as Fenris’s hair, and the fluttering pump of the veins in his throat as they spurted blood. His first instinct was to heal, of course – he even took half a step in the Arishok’s direction before stopping himself. The Qunari thought him too dangerous to live simply because he hadn’t been blind, mute, and chained like the Saarebas since childhood, but perhaps they would risk that danger if it meant saving their leader, an unwanted life spared so a wanted one could be saved. 

“Your Arishok is dying. If you spare me, I can heal him.” 

The Qunari shrugged. “If he is meant to die, it will be the will of the Qun. You have tried to poison all of us, _bas-Saarebas_ , and the Qun requires your death.” The other Qunari encircled Anders, spears low and at the ready. “ _Vinek kathas_!” 

“If he dies, you will have no leader!” Anders sputtered, trying to force the words from his lips as quickly as possible, while struggling to keep Justice from trying to use the feeble amount of mana he had left to incinerate all of them, which would have been more like tossing a lit match at one of their broad, vitaar-stained chests. “You saw the chains go up in the harbor. No one can sail out of Kirkwall or into it. So you cannot leave or get reinforcements. An Exalted March from Val Royeaux would arrive much sooner than a ship from Par Vollen. Eventually you will be stopped.” 

A rivulet of sweat trickled down his temple, catching in his eyelashes and stinging his eyes with its salt, and his knees shuddered beneath him, on the brink of collapse. He staggered in relief as the Qunari lowered their weapons – though magic still glowed in the Saarebas’s fists – and bowed their heads together in discussion. Over the faint gurgle of the Arishok slowly drowning in his own blood, Anders thought he could make out the word “ _qamek_ ” being bandied about between the others. 

_Not that_ , he thought. _Never that_. 

“No _qamek_ ,” he said, knowing that he was in no position to bargain – he’d always been a terrible Wicked Grace player, but he was fairly sure he’d shown his entire hand already. Years on the run, even those spent trying to be a respectable citizen, meant lies still came easily to his tongue, though, much to Justice’s dismay, and he said, “If you use it on me, I will forget all my healing spells and be useless. But if you do not – I am the most powerful spirit healer in Kirkwall. I can save your Arishok and many more besides.” 

The Qunari’s lips thinned, and Anders saw a flash of sharp teeth bared in a disgusted grimace. “The bargain is made, _basra_ ,” the Qunari said at last. “Work your spells.” 

Anders backed toward the Arishok, not wanting to take his eyes off the Saarebas. Justice might be quick enough to erect a barrier against a hurled spear, but magic could be much more immediate, and the Saarebas had trained all their lives to do nothing but kill with magic, it seemed. He knelt down by the Arishok and did a quick inventory of his wounds. The Qunari’s breath still whistled, thin and painful, through his pierced throat, but the blood oozing from around the shaft of the arrow was slowing and thickening. Anders did the examination with his eyes and carefully palpating fingertips – normally he would have used magic for so urgent an injury, but he couldn’t trust his supply of mana. He could feel the well of it refilling, but too slowly, like water seeping into a hole dug deep into the arid ground of the Anderfels. As they slid around the back of the Arishok’s thick neck, his fingers caught on the sharp tip of the arrowhead. A clean shot, then, no barbed points to wrench free from bone. He’d had enough of easing those out of bodies in the Deep Roads to last him a lifetime. 

He reached out to the Fade, letting the magic course through him, enjoying the feel of it unfiltered through Justice’s control, and cast the healing spell. Filaments of magic wove around the wound, boring into the Arishok’s flesh like threaded needles, stitching up sinews, vessels, muscle. A neat swipe of magic sliced off the arrowhead, which fell to the paving stones beneath the Arishok with a clatter, and Anders plucked out the rest of the arrow by its fletchings – he’d have to add the feathers to his coat someday as a reminder. Behind him, he heard the gravelly, garbled mutter of a Saarebas trying to speak through sewn-together lips. Though he didn’t speak Qunlat – and certainly didn’t understand Qunlat spoken by a stitched-shut mouth – he thought he could hear awe in the warped words. Perhaps this gambit would work after all, and the Qunari would realize he was too valuable to simply kill. 

The Arishok gasped, a sound like a bellows being pumped, and started upright, his eyes flying open, one hand clutching his throat and finding only smooth, if bloody, skin. 

“What madness is this?” he asked, and though he sounded calm, Anders could sense him edging away, as if Anders were a barrel of _gaatlok_ about to explode. 

Anders had never seen a Qunari look truly frightened before, but the one who stepped forward – he thought it was the one who had made the agreement with him – certainly looked abashed. “The _bas-Saarebas_ vowed to save your life with its magic in exchange for its life.” 

The Arishok’s shoulders in their heavy pauldrons sank, and he let out a deep sigh, though Anders recognized the exasperation of it rather than any fatigue – it was the sort of sigh First Enchanter Irving breathed out when Anders was hauled into his office, only much, much, well, _louder_. Then the Arishok raised his head and let loose a string of blistering Qunlat, as if he couldn’t properly express his contempt in the common tongue, and even though he was still sitting on the ground, the words seemed to come from a great height. The other Qunari shifted from foot to foot uneasily, looking as much like chastened schoolboys as Anders imagined it was impossible for Qunari to look. None of them so much as opened their mouths to interject or contradict – they simply bowed their horned heads and waited for the onslaught to end. 

By the time the Arishok finished, he was panting. He brushed the tips of his claws through the tacky blood on his throat and stared at it for a long moment. “No one truly of the Qun would permit their bodies to be touched by magic,” he said finally. He gave Anders a quick, scathing glance. “I know things are different in the south, but in Par Vollen, there are some who would consider me as tainted as you are, _bas_.” 

“But that’s not—” Anders protested, but the Arishok raised his still-bloody hand as if to shove Anders’s words back at him. 

“I will have to be watched closely for signs of that taint. If I were not needed here, I would take the path of the Saarebas who is separated from his Arvaarad, but I cannot. Nor can I force that fate on you, even though you are _bas-Saarebas_. It goes against the demands of the Qun, but the Qunari will not abandon a debt,” the Arishok said. His heavy brow furrowed as he glowered up at Anders from under it, the wrinkles in his forehead like cuts in stone, like the divots in the dungeon walls Anders had chipped out to mark his days there. 

Anders rose, offering a hand to the Arishok out of habit – it was ignored. “Excellent,” he said with a brightness he didn’t feel. “Then after I answer your questions, I am free to go?” 

The Arishok got slowly to his feet – it was like watching a tower of stone being erected. When he was standing, hardly wavering at all to Anders’s eyes, he glared down at Anders and said, with a curt jerk of his head and a finality like a dagger to the heart, “No.” 

****************

“As prisons go,” Anders said, tripping over his own feet as his captor tugged at the rope connected to his bound hands, “it could be worse.” The room the Qunari had led him to appeared to have been some sort of City Guard barracks, its walls lined with rough, narrow bunks, though now there was a lighter spot on the stone wall where the Viscount’s crest had once hung. “Does the Viscount know you’ve been redecorating? Or does your Arishok already know he won’t be coming back?” 

No answer, not even a surly grunt of annoyance, which Anders had gotten more than used to during his time in solitary confinement. The Qunari’s silence seemed heavier than just a usual lack of sound – it was the pointedness of it, Anders assumed, the deliberate choice to ignore everything he said. It seemed to swallow his flippant words as soon as they left his mouth. Still, he couldn’t keep himself from talking, no longer sure if he was trying to keep himself and Justice distracted from their predicament or to goad the Qunari into just killing him straight away. His self-preservation, always somewhat intermittent, seemed to flit back and forth indecisively, like a bee flying between a rose and some kind of poisonous bloom. 

“Speaking of the Arishok, I would think he would want to keep his new healer closer than this. You know, in case of a paper cut or an assassination attempt.” 

The Qunari who had been dragging him along gave the rope a sharp jerk that sent Anders stumbling onto one of the beds. He managed to catch himself short of braining himself on the wall and sat down on the thin, lumpy hay-filled mattress. The room really _was_ an improvement over his cell in Kinloch Hold – a few stray beams of sunlight filtered in from the windows across the wide corridor, and the air still moved and smelled of straw, leather, old sweat, and sword oil instead of damp, rot, mold, or death. Here, at least, he didn’t feel the weight of the Keep above pressing down on him as heavily as that of the entire Tower had or, worse, the leagues of stone in the Deep Roads. 

“There must be wounded who need tending,” Anders said, watching as the Qunari wrapped the end of the rope binding his wrists around one of the bed posts. “Though it seems like perhaps you were in the market for a Mabari rather than a spirit healer.” 

The Qunari ignored him, knotting the rope and turning away to rifle through a wardrobe. Anders tested his bonds – they were loose, but he was bound all the same – and tried to resist both the urge to show the Qunari that tied hands weren’t the hindrance to mages that everyone in Kirkwall seemed to believe they were and the impulse to throw himself onto the bed and gibber in terror at being imprisoned again and shut away from the world. Justice’s presence was just another strain on him – he could tell the spirit was holding himself in check, but only just, as Anders’s fear goaded him. 

“ _Parshaara, bas_ ,” the Qunari muttered over his huge, silver-gray shoulder. “You have been allowed to run free for too long, and now your prattle puts all who hear you at risk.” 

“You obviously know little of the south then,” Anders replied. “I haven’t been free since I was a child.” Telling the Qunari that he was already possessed by a spirit and was therefore immune to the dealings with demons that seemed to make them all but piss themselves in fear probably wouldn’t have had the hoped-for effect, but the words teetered on his tongue no matter how much he tried to swallow them back. 

The Qunari’s knuckles caught him across the mouth – it would have been a lazy backhand from a human, but from a Qunari, the blow knocked him sideways onto the mattress, the back of his head rebounding off the stone wall behind him. His teeth cut into the inside of his lower lip, and the warm, ferrous taste of blood filled his mouth. He reached out to the Fade to heal himself – he had enough mana left for minor cuts and bruises. 

_Is that wise?_ Justice asked, the usual thunder of his voice modulated to something almost cautious, as if Anders were the one who needed to be handled with kid gloves rather than the other way around. Perhaps the spirit had a point. _Once you have connected to the Fade, you will be loath to let it go. The temptation will be too great. For both of us._

The decision was made for him when the Qunari turned back from rummaging in the wardrobe, arms full of boiled leather and dull metal. He dropped his burden onto the bed beside Anders and selected what looked like a mask made of battered gold metal – a mask sized for a Qunari’s head. His captor shoved it onto Anders’s face – the thing immediately slipped, settling on his cheekbones and blocking his vision completely. After a moment and an annoyed huff of breath, the Qunari plucked it off again and, with a hideous creak of metal, crushed the visor in his massive hands until it was roughly the right size for Anders’s head. 

The narrow glimpses of his surroundings that he was able to get after the visor had been fitted back into place should have been a comfort after utter blindness, but knowing that such shuttered vision would be all but permanent quickly scrubbed away any sense of relief. Anders spat a gob of blood onto the bed and said, “I suppose I should be kitted out properly to fit in with the other Saarebas, but I’m a healer – I need to see my work. This isn’t indiscriminately throwing around lightning bolts, you know.” 

He tried not to flinch away when the Qunari wrenched the handkerchief from the front of his coat, and then he could not move at all, as his captor caught Anders’s jaw easily in one hand and forced his mouth open, stuffing the handkerchief inside. Anders gagged around the cloth – it tasted like smoke and stone dust – but his panicked gurgling didn’t seem to bother the Qunari. Perhaps the fellow was accustomed to hearing it from the Qunari Saarebas who had to force their words through their sewn-together lips. 

Through the slats in the visor, Anders could only make out the basic shape of the Qunari as he took a set of enormous boiled leather pauldrons from the pile on the bed. When he forced them onto Anders’s shoulders, they were buoyed up slightly by the feathered ones on Anders’s own coat, though they still slipped as soon as he moved. The layer of worn fabric and singed feathers between his shoulders and the new pauldrons did nothing to lessen the clumsy weight of them, and he felt himself slouching, slumping, as if he were slowly melting into the mattress beneath him. 

_They’re building a prison around me_ , he thought and instantly regretted it. Panic scrabbled inside him – his own and Justice’s. He could almost feel its tiny, needle-like claws, and he remembered the pet rat of another apprentice at the Ferelden Circle, kept in a small wooden box with holes carved out of the lid, and how its frantic scratching had kept him awake at night. Karl had eventually set the poor thing free – its beady eyes had seemed grateful before it ducked into a hole in the skirting board. How to free fear, though, short of letting it consume him until it summoned a fear demon with its sheer intensity? To Anders’s surprise, that thought earned barely a mutter of protest from Justice. 

The clinking of chains only intensified the panic, especially when rough hands tugged the heavy links through the round buckles of his coat. He could feel the phantom weight of manacles on his wrists, the burn of raw skin scraped away by their rough metal edges. The rattle of heavy chains, old iron ones, filled his ears, a memory of the sound of his bonds being tested again and again and never giving way, never allowing him even an inch more of freedom. Anders dug his fingernails into the soft wood of the bed frame as if anchoring himself physically could keep him from losing control mentally. Sweat poured down his back, tickling over the untouched skin and slipping unfelt over the scars. 

He was collapsing in on himself, just as he had in the dungeon at Kinloch Hold, though now he could recognize it for what it was – not madness, but a paring away of anything extraneous to focus all his energy on staying alive. It had been a slower process back at the Ferelden Circle – he’d managed to make a nuisance of himself for months until his templar guards had started leaving more and more time between bringing him food and water. Perhaps the presence of Mr. Wiggums had helped back then, or perhaps he knew the reality of imprisonment too well now to bother fighting it. He was not alone now either, and the presence of Justice should have been a comfort – and _had_ been one before, though he had to admit that a possibly corrupted spirit of Justice wasn’t as soothing as a sleek tabby mouser. No, Justice was a worry now. The more of himself he closed off, like disused rooms in the mansion, the more space Justice would have to fill up and take over. 

More weight was added to his shoulders, balancing heavily on his clavicle, cold where it touched his bare skin. _The collar_. He thrashed beneath the Qunari’s practiced hands that quickly locked the collar into place, trying to shrug it off of himself, eyes streaming as he screamed around the gag in his mouth. Justice surged like floodwater in a squall but was somehow held back, as if a dam had been thrown up in his path. Anders tried to wrestle back control and reached out for the Fade – he could sense it there, the alluring flicker of magic, the cool green haze of the Fade, but it was as if he were seeing it through a locked and bolted window. His connection brushed against a clear but hard barrier, smooth as glass but impenetrable. There had been no painful snapping back of the connection, like there was with a templar’s Smite; no muddled, half-drunk feeling as there would have been with magebane; but the Fade – and his magic with it – was lost to him. He could feel Justice hurling himself at the barrier and hear his distant, enraged bellowing at the injustice of it, but still the barrier remained. 

Heavy footsteps rumbled in the hallway, and though he couldn’t make out much through the slats of his mask, Anders sensed that the room had become more crowded, even before the Qunari began exchanging curt volleys of Qunlat. They seemed to conserve their words even more than Fenris did, but perhaps Qunlat was just more efficient than the common tongue, though Anders doubted it. The Saarebas might not even have noticed the difference after having their lips sewn shut if Qunari were always so taciturn. 

He tried to make out what they were saying, but the words were totally unfamiliar now, and even listening for tone was pointless with Qunari. The Arishok was the only one Anders had ever heard speak with much inflection, and he was somewhat thankful that none of the new arrivals were the Qunari leader. The Arishok was his protector now, to some extent, but he would also be his judge if he decided to default on the debt he owed to Anders. That must have been the cloud that Fenris had perpetually lived under in the Imperium, he realized, needing protection from the very person most likely to do him harm. His throat tightened convulsively at the thought of Fenris, and he gagged on the handkerchief in his mouth, saliva dripping from the corners of his open lips and mingling with the sweat and tears rolling down his cheeks. 

The noise must have drawn the Qunari’s attention, for a moment later, several pairs of immense, strong hands grabbed hold of him, pinning him to the bed by wrists, shoulders, and ankles. He thrashed ineffectually against those shackle-like grips, which earned him another blow to the face. Blood oozed from his nose down into his throat, and its thick warmth made him retch harder. 

The gag was tugged from his mouth, and he gasped for air, taking deep painful breaths before trying to shout. The cry was choked off by something viscous being forced onto his tongue, followed by a hand big enough to cover the whole lower half of his face clamping over his mouth. It was some sort of bitter paste, curling his tongue even as he tried to scream. Was this _qamek_? The thought made him flail harder, and he tried to keep from swallowing, though the thick liquid trickled inexorably down his throat. It tasted faintly of elfroot, and as it spread throughout his mouth, his lips and tongue began to feel thick and numb, and his head began to swim in a way that had nothing to do with the two backhands he’d taken across the face. 

“ _Kost, bas_ ,” one of the Qunari murmured. “It will go easier for you if you do not fight.” 

_Hold still, boy_ , a remembered voice growled in a rough Fereldan accent. _This will be worse if you fight_. The rope around his wrists seemed to tighten in quick jerks, the coarse fiber of it leaving burning wheals in his flesh, though when he moved, the bindings were just as slack as before. _Don’t fight it, robe_ , another voice in his memory hissed. _It’ll be the lash if you do_. But he’d gotten the lash anyway; his scars throbbed as if to remind him. He struggled harder, until his breath seared in his nostrils and his vision was blurred less by the visor and more by the hot tears puddled in his eyes. 

Finally, another hand pressed down hard on his forehead and the one over his mouth slid down to grip his chin, clenching his jaw shut, and between them his head was pinned immobile to the mattress. Something sharp pricked the corner of his mouth – at least he _thought_ it was sharp; his lips were so numb that it felt only like insistent pressure – and was driven into his flesh. Though the hand had left his mouth, he couldn’t cry out; only sobs bubbled up from his throat, harsh, self-pitying sobs that barely disturbed his lips as the Qunari stitched them together. 

He let the blackness lapping at the edges of his vision overtake him, subsuming him in a dark, empty void where he was free of whatever was happening to his physical body. It was a familiar place, if not altogether comforting – he’d been there many times when the templars had stretched him over the rough cot in his cell and beaten him, and it had been that darkness he’d sought when the cold waters of Lake Calenhad had closed over his head. But now he didn’t find emptiness there – now the memory of lyrium prickled over his back and upper arms; now he felt the gossamer of Fenris’s hair against the back of his neck, the fainter brush of his eyelashes against his shoulder, the humid softness of his lips just beneath the clenched corner of his jaw. Into the silence came a hushing sound, almost a hum, the strange soothing croon that Fenris breathed into his ear when he woke up from nightmares summoned into being by the taint in his blood, followed by a murmured, “If the Archdemon weren’t dead, mage, I would happily kill it again for waking me up every night.” 

Anders felt himself go limp on the straw mattress, felt his body relax as if it belonged to someone else. Was this how someone clinging in vain to an outcropping on a cliff face felt when they finally let go, the same unclenching of knotted muscles, the same acceptance of one’s fate? Justice was there, seeping into the spaces within him that Anders had abandoned, taking control of the breath that whistled between gritted teeth, calming the heart that fluttered and floundered in their shared chest, leaving Anders to disappear into a soft darkness filled with phantom touches and remembered words.


	33. Chapter 33

When they climbed up out of the tunnels, the Gallows was gone. Cullen, in a rare shirking of his responsibility to protect the mages, had pushed past Fenris and stumbled to one of the open mineshafts that overlooked the bay, leaning out so far that Fenris had almost had to haul him back by his belt before he tipped himself into the water below, soupy with Darktown’s filth. The cry the templar released when he saw the smoking remnants of the island sounded torn from somewhere deep inside, somewhere vital, as if Fenris had reached into him and plucked it out.

Fenris watched him out of the corner of his eyes, half of his attention on helping the mages out of the tunnel shaft and half of it on observing Cullen as he fell to his knees, head bowed and hands clasped, and began reciting the Chant. The words sounded choked, Cullen’s voice breaking when he reached the passage about the peacekeepers, the Champions of the Just. Fenris wondered if mere words could bring any true comfort when your comrades were dead, your home a skeleton with a few bits of masonry clinging to it like scraps of charred flesh. He had gone to the Chantry in Hightown once in a while when he’d first come to Kirkwall and had found some peace in its shadowy, incense-scented chapels, but as soon as a Chantry sister happened upon him and gave him a startled look that settled quickly into suspicion, any illusion of being in a sanctuary had disappeared and he’d never returned. 

If someone – the Maker, perhaps? – was keeping a tally of losses suffered, maybe Cullen’s would have outweighed his own at that moment. What was one scruffy, poorly dressed, possessed, lying mage, however beloved, against one’s home, one’s brothers-in-arms, one’s very purpose? And yet hadn’t Anders been all of those things to him, as little as he wanted to admit it? He had no time for such self-indulgence, though, he told himself, as he hoisted the smallest apprentices up from the tunnels one by one. Had he lingered over the bodies of the Fog Warriors before he’d run away? He could remember taking a few ragged breaths that had seared his throat, and then he’d run. Perhaps it was not an honorable way to mourn friends, but it was a way to survive. Survive he had and survive he would. He’d lived through this loss before, this stripping away of everything he cared about, everything he knew. Twice before, even if the first time was still mostly lost to memory. 

Cullen looked smaller as he knelt with his back to Fenris and the mages. Before they’d crawled up out of the tunnels, Fenris had made the mages and apprentices take off their hoods – the Qunari might not look closely enough at humans to tell a mage from anyone else in a robe, but the white hoods especially were like beacons. They’d sloughed them off like dead skin – some of them hesitantly; others eagerly, the hoods half off before Fenris had even finished speaking – and thrown them in a pile. Cullen had taken more convincing to shuck off his armor. Fenris had had to point out that an armored man was always a target in Darktown and that the flaming sword on his breastplate would draw Qunari down on them after the skirmish of the previous night. Finally, with a look that could only have been called petulant, Cullen had unbuckled his breastplate and dropped it on the pile, followed by the rest of his plate, the clang of metal on metal ringing and echoing back in the narrow tunnel. He’d looked younger without it – though that might have partly been the slight pout – and Fenris realized that he was much, much younger than Anders, younger even than Fenris himself. 

“We can come back for it,” Fenris offered, but Cullen just shook his head, rubbing the newly bare nape of his neck with an ungauntleted hand. 

“It’ll be melted down before we reach Hightown,” Cullen replied, the plumminess of his voice gone sour. “This is still Darktown, after all.” He brushed past Fenris, the mages shuffling after him, their bare heads bowed. 

Fenris had waited until all of them had filed past and stood there for a moment, staring at the pile of discarded hoods and the empty shell of Cullen’s armor, like the carcass of a crab picked clean of its meat by ravening seagulls. He had nothing to shed himself of, no transformation – however slight – to mark his passage into a new phase of his life. His markings had served that purpose once, as well as the loss of his real name, and then when he’d fled Danarius, the absence of his chains had denoted the crossing of a threshold from one life to another. Now he wished he could peel off his own skin, the unbranded skin, the skin that the mage had touched and kissed, every brush of fingertips and lips seeming to draw his nerves back to the surface, like parched roots seeking rain. That unmarked flesh remembered the mage’s touch when Fenris wanted to forget it, and without it, all that would be left was scar tissue. 

A hesitant tap on his vambrace brought him back to himself, and he blinked down at the young, upturned face of one of the apprentices. She gave him a tentative, tremulous smile, and her eyes shone with barely held-back tears – she was scarcely more than a child, and yet she was managing to continue on, to follow him and Cullen blindly yet faithfully into the unknown of the world outside the Circle. His cheeks suddenly burned with shame, and he glanced away quickly. 

“Beg your pardon, Serah, but the Knight-Captain has reached the tunnel’s exit and wanted to know if you were coming along?” she said. 

Cullen must have forgotten about his plans for a noose. Not that a noose would have worked, Fenris thought, curling his fingers into his palms until he could feel the familiar lines of lyrium etched into them. “Yes, of course,” he replied and watched her dart back the way she’d come after giving him a slight bob of the head, as if she were a slave doing her master’s bidding. But no, that was foolish, and anger at himself for even making the comparison coiled tight in his stomach. Mages were dangerous, had always been and would always be dangerous, and proof of that was the choking smoke he could smell even in this underground tunnel and the brilliant column of fire that was still burned into his vision when he closed his eyes, reversed to lurid green behind his eyelids rather than the eerie pink it had been. 

He’d half-heartedly covered Cullen’s armor with some of the mages’ hoods and the fronds of a few nearby ferns, and then he jogged to where Cullen and the mages waited at the tunnel entrance. No sooner had they shoved the heavy wooden cover off the opening than Cullen had scrambled out of the tunnel, and there he’d been ever since, murmuring his useless prayers even as the head of Andraste was tossed back and forth on the waves of the bay below. 

Fenris’s stomach had seemed to plummet to his knees when he saw the gap where the Gallows had been, where the stark angular lines of the fortress, implacable as ancient cliffs, had been replaced by plumes of stone dust and black smoke. 

“Help the little ones out,” he’d muttered over his shoulder to one of the older mages and walked over to where Cullen knelt. The wind off the bay pushed his hair off his forehead and left a fine layer of grit on his face, pulverized stone and ashes settling on his cheeks. He resisted the urge to scrub it away, the anger inside him clenching hard as he thought of Anders trying to break him of the habit of constantly flicking away any speck of dirt from his skin or armor. It nearly choked him when he remembered the mage nudging his face into the sweat-soaked valley between Fenris’s thigh and groin after Fenris peeled off his leggings to bathe after hours of practicing the sword. He dug one of Anders’s handkerchiefs out of his belt pouch, wiped it over his face – trying to ignore the grassy, fresh butter smell that Anders’s sweat had left on it – and tossed it out over the water. The breeze snatched it up and buffeted it back and forth, swirling it on currents of air like the feathers Anders had left in his wake before he’d disappeared down the corridor toward the Gallows’ dungeons. 

He swallowed back the taste of bile and something thick and heavy that perched on the back of this tongue – a sob, he might have said, if he’d ever been one to weep, and reached out to rest his hand on Cullen’s hunched shoulder. But his gauntlet hung in the air between them, uncertain as the handkerchief caught on the eddies of wind. Perhaps he did feel as lost as Cullen appeared, but the man had still threatened to hang him not an hour gone, and Fenris wasn’t one for comforting pats on the shoulder. That was, of course, more Anders’s specialty. Cutting words and soothing hands. 

This time, he spat the bitter taste into the scummy water below and gave Cullen’s upper arm a quick nudge with the back of his gauntlet, not caring that the man now wore only a tunic rather than armor. “We should move on,” he said. “I know a way to—” He stumbled for a moment – it suddenly felt wrong to call it _his_ home, for without Anders it no longer felt like a home and it had never really been his to begin with. “—to Hightown, through the abandoned mine shafts. We can keep the mages out of sight.” 

Cullen finally raised his head, glaring up at Fenris with bloodshot eyes. “I wish I could cut my way to Hightown through those blighted Qunari,” he spat, his lips peeled back from his clenched teeth. “How many men were lost to their barbaric use of magic?” He looked down at his still-clasped hands, their knuckles white with pressure. “I should have been leading them. It was my duty as Knight-Captain to lead them.” 

Fenris opened his mouth to correct him – did the fellow really think the Saarebas had wreaked such destruction? – but then the tittering of the mages drifted to him through the usual noise of Darktown, and he snapped it closed again. As little as he liked the idea of herding free mages around Kirkwall – as little as he liked mages, full stop – the explosion at the Gallows could be laid at the feet of one specific mage, though he doubted that distinction would have meant anything to Cullen. If he had been in Cullen’s place, Fenris couldn’t say that it would have meant much to him either. But as it was, he couldn’t stand by and let Cullen hurt innocent mages if he discovered the truth of what had happened at the Gallows. He might help the templar keep them confined and contained until they could be officially reassigned to other Circles – for Fenris doubted there would be a Kirkwall Circle for months to come, if not longer – but even now, even with the memory of Anders’s betrayal a still-oozing wound, he would not let Cullen kill them, any more than he would let the templar make them all Tranquil. 

“Soon,” was all he managed to say. “Once Orsino can teach the mages some—” 

“Do you think Orsino knows anything about fighting either?” Cullen snapped. “He is a Circle mage as well. They are not permitted to learn such things.” 

“If they can light a candle with magic, they can turn a _karataam_ into a bonfire,” Fenris replied. “If it were merely a matter of them knowing spells or not, you would not keep such a close eye on them.” This time he did rest his hand on the templar’s back, but only to gather a handful of Cullen’s tunic in his fist and haul him to his feet. “For now, the responsibility for Kirkwall’s mages is on your shoulders and yours alone. They are your duty as well.” 

Some of the indignation smoothed from Cullen’s face, and he nodded. “Very well. Lead the way to these mine shafts.” 

  
The winding warrens of Darktown seemed less teeming with the dregs of humanity than usual – the Qunari must have put them to work, while those who preferred crime or being drunken layabouts had been driven into the sewers. Fenris was slightly impressed that Kirkwallers had found somewhere even lower than Darktown to sink. As they walked, though, Fenris felt himself sinking lower and lower the closer they drew to Anders’s old clinic, until his feet seemed to be slogging through thick mud rather than stepping on the hard-packed dirt, filth, and stone of Darktown. 

The opening to the mine shafts, clogged with fallen planks, abandoned mine carts, and other detritus, that led ultimately to the cellar of the mansion in Hightown was close, too close, to the boarded-up clinic – Fenris could still see the unlit lantern hanging out front, like a cocoon from which a moth would never hatch. 

“It’s here,” he murmured to Cullen, who began to gingerly climb the rackety ladder up into the mine shaft after gesturing to the mages to follow. Fenris drifted away from them as they clustered around the base of the ladder, waiting to climb into yet another dark tunnel filled with Maker-knew-what kinds of threats, and walked over to the clinic doors. 

He glared up at the lantern, listening to the tiny creak it made as it swung minutely on its chain, before sliding his sword from its sheath and burying the blade in the wooden hook it dangled from. It took a few hacking strokes to turn the wood to splinters, and then the lantern crashed to his feet. He almost expected the rickety door to swing open and Anders to stick his head out and make some ridiculous quip, an awful pun or an evocation of Andraste’s undergarments. The stupidest jokes had always been his favorite, Fenris thought, nearly gagging on the thickness in his throat, as he battered the lantern with the blade and pommel of his sword, not caring that he struck sparks as metal clashed against metal. 

There was a roaring in his ears as he stared down at the mass of mangled metal, splintered wood, and shattered glass at his feet, but instead of the clamor of an explosion fueled by magic, it was the thunder of his own heartbeat, the rasp of his breath. The lantern would never be lit again, and he felt as if something had been snuffed out in him as well, not a candle flame pinched out by damp fingers but inundated by a torrent of water, drowned, deluged, dead. Perhaps he should have felt washed clean inside by that flood, but he felt at once empty and somehow stained, like a bottle coated with dust. 

He slammed his sword into its sheath and turned on his heel, heading for the mineshaft entrance where a few straggling Tranquil waited to make their climb up the ladder. His hands shook when they finally grasped the rungs, but he clenched them until the rotting wood creaked in protest and they stilled. He must not break now. If he could keep himself whole long enough, he could leave Kirkwall and travel across Thedas until he found a place where he could forget what had happened in this blighted city, where time would wipe his memory as clean as Danarius’s magic once had. No, he would not let himself be broken by a mage, not again. 

***************

The First Enchanter met them at the door of the mansion, white-faced, his hollowed eyes roving over the milling group of mages and apprentices as if he were trying to do a frantic head-count. 

“Is this all of them?” he asked Cullen, who nodded. “So you arrived before… the Qunari landed?” It seemed to Fenris that other words had been intended to fill that pause – surely Orsino must have felt magic of that magnitude, even from his perch in Hightown. He must have _seen_ it, and yet he appeared incurious, nor had he seemed surprised that Anders wasn’t with them. 

“A matter of minutes,” Cullen replied. “The Gallows is gone, Orsino.” His voice caught in his throat as he spoke, and Fenris heard a faint gulp as he swallowed hard. 

“Maker,” Orsino breathed. Then his gaze finally rested on Fenris, and he said, “And your friend?” Perhaps there was a tinge of hope in those words, a spark that fell on damp kindling and didn’t catch, but the question seemed more driven by curiosity than anything else. 

“Dead,” Fenris replied. _As you well know_. His eyes burned, from the black scarves of _gaatlok_ smoke still draped over Hightown or the fur of those blighted cats – he could see it floating in drifts in the stagnant air of the foyer. “In the course of trying to fulfill a promise to you, it would seem.” 

Two faint spots of red bloomed on Orsino’s sharp cheekbones, and he murmured something that could have been an apology or a prayer. Either would have been equally meaningless to Fenris, even if Anders _had_ died just in trying to carry out Orsino’s wishes, but even more so since Fenris knew that Anders had immolated himself, taking the entire Gallows with him. 

Cullen was watching them, narrowed eyes darting between Fenris and Orsino. “It matters not. He was an apostate and an abomination. Death was the only option for him, either then or at the end of a rope later.” 

“The two of you should see to your charges,” Fenris said. If Anders had been standing before him now, he couldn’t say he wouldn’t have torn out the mage’s heart himself, but he certainly wouldn’t have let Cullen do the honors. “I’m sure a Qunari patrol would not look kindly on this many humans congregating in the streets.” He elbowed his way past them and headed for the wine cellar, wishing more than ever that he’d saved a few bottles of the Agreggio. 

  
Fenris took two bottles of Hanged Man swill up to the tower room, leaving the lower floors to Cullen, Orsino, and the mages. He was a ghost again, just as he’d been on a wider scale in Hightown Estates – only then he’d confined himself to the mansion, rather than to a single room, to avoid his high-strung, meddlesome neighbors. His markings itched. Magic was being worked below, and Maker knew how Cullen expected to be able to Smite that many mages if something went awry. A more distant but stronger magic prickled along the swirls of lyrium in his skin, and a few seconds later, he saw blue-white rapiers of lightning stab down from the sky, followed by an eruption of masonry from a Hightown rooftop. The Saarebas then. He wished he could differentiate between the various magics, beyond simply being able to vaguely guess at their strength and proximity. Anders had told him once how he’d learned to pick out his fellow Grey Wardens based on the taint in their blood singing to that in his own, and he envied that ability. If Anders were out there in Kirkwall, being able to separate the stream of his magic from the surging waves of the Saarebas’ and the confluent rivers of the mages’ downstairs would have been… what? A comfort? A scent to follow in the hunt for his quarry? 

He settled onto the window seat and stared out over Kirkwall and the bay, tugging the cork out of one of the bottles and taking a deep swallow. If only the vinegary taste of the Lowtown red could burn away such useless, foolish thoughts as thoroughly as it seared his throat on the way down. Anders was dead. And his job had been complete indeed. From this height, Fenris could see the gaping rent in the island on which the Gallows had stood, as if a massive fist had punched down from the heavens and left the dungeons far below ground level open to the sky. The courtyard looked mostly intact, but the double towers remained only as outlines of their former selves, frail as articulated bird skeletons. Nothing moved on that desolate rock now, other than the lingering haze of smoke that shifted with the wind like a living creature. 

The sky cleared as the dust and smoke were carried out into the Waking Sea, then darkened with the coming night as Fenris sat there, gazing out over the city, eyes burning. Sometimes Hightown wobbled and disappeared at the edges when his eyes began to water, but he blinked away the moisture and went back to it. At some point, the cats had discovered his hiding place and joined him, though they all seemed unsettled, perhaps because of the sudden arrival of so many houseguests, perhaps because of the equally sudden disappearance of Anders. Mister Pudding-Paws wandered around the room, letting out quizzical wails as if asking where his favorite chin-scratcher was. _He is nothing but ashes now_ , Fenris wanted to tell him, but the words would, of course, have been lost on a cat. Not that that had ever stopped Anders from yammering at them for hours. He gagged on his mouthful of wine and spat it onto the dusty floor. 

Knight-Commander Meowedith, for her part, was boxing Soporatus’s ears so vigorously that the enormous cat hauled himself to his feet and waddled over to Fenris for protection, clambering into his lap and spreading across his thighs. The cat’s weight and solidity were somehow comforting, and Fenris rewarded him with a few scritches under the chin with the tips of his fingerguards. How simple it was for the animals, how uncomplicated their grieving – they only lamented the absence of a warm lap, a cooing voice, a hand offering a saucer of milk. They knew only that Anders was gone, not that he had lied or murdered dozens, if not hundreds, to further his own agenda. 

Night fell as he sat there, fingers buried in Soporatus’s fur and eyes trained on what had been the Gallows, though there was nothing there to see but the tiny flicker of the remaining fires and the glint of moonlight on the bay. A timid knock on the spongy wood of the doorjamb jerked him from his vigil, and he turned to find one of the apprentices standing in the doorway, a plate in one hand and a lit lamp in the other. 

“Excuse me, Messere, I don’t mean to bother you, but the Knight-Captain asked me to bring you this,” she said. She crept a few steps into the room as she spoke, her head bowed, the plate held stiffly out in front of her. 

In the shifting light cast by her lamp, Fenris could make out a wrinkled apple cut into slices, browning at the edges, a wedge of white cheese, a hunk of bread – all the food that he’d stocked the pantry with for Anders. He rarely ate himself, and his stomach clenched now at the sight of the same food he’d often brought to Anders when the mage was too immersed in scribbling away at his manifesto to get up from the table. It would have just rotted on the shelves now, and he couldn’t begrudge Cullen and the mages the use of it, but the memory of long, ink-stained fingers accepting a plate of food or a glass of watered wine made his mouth thick with the taste of bile. 

“I’m not hungry,” he said. His voice sounded harsh with disuse to his ears, and he cleared his throat and added, “I thank you for your trouble.” 

She gave a little shrug that he recognized immediately – discomfort at being thanked for doing something one was told to do, something one _had_ to do under threat of punishment. The bile rose higher on his tongue, his chin buckling as he tried to swallow back a wave of nausea. How many times had he insisted to Anders that Circle mages were nothing like slaves? And yet here he was again, seeing his former self – the self he sometimes reverted back to far too easily – in the gestures and posture of a Circle mage. 

The girl was somehow familiar to him, though it could have just been her brilliant red hair reminding him of Varania or her bony wrists that her robe’s sleeves didn’t quite cover reminding him of Anders. She shuffled from foot to foot as if trying to decide whether she should go back downstairs or stay there until he dismissed her. 

“Are you hungry?” he asked, and the question must have been a surprise, for her head jerked up and she looked at him directly for the first time since she’d entered the room. “Have you had enough to eat?” 

“Yes, Messere,” she replied. “I mean, no, Messere.” She raked her teeth over her bottom lip, took a deep breath, and said, “That is, yes, I am hungry, and no, I haven’t had enough to eat.” Her cheeks flamed as brightly as her hair, and she ducked her head again. “I’m not complaining, Messere. Just answering the question.” 

He felt a smile tugging at his lips in spite of himself and bit it back. Maybe it wasn’t just her skinny wrists that reminded him of Anders. “Eat it, if you like. Otherwise the cats will.” 

“Thank you, Messere!” she said and sat down at the partially collapsed table, setting her lamp on the more stable bench beside her and holding the plate in place so that it didn’t slide onto the floor. Fenris looked away – he recognized her tidy yet hurried way of eating, neat so as not to anger the master, quick lest the food be snatched from her. He turned his gaze back toward the now-dark window, trying to ignore the sound of her busy chewing. 

“Do you know many mages, Messere?” she asked around a mouthful of food. 

“I… uh…” he floundered. Yes, he knew mages. Blood mages, power-hungry magisters, mages who would kill for an ounce of status, mages who would betray their own brother to get ahead, mages who lied and murdered for an unwinnable cause. He thought of Anders’s youthful enthusiasm about Tevinter, a country ruled by mages, and wondered if this apprentice had heard the same stories and had the same foolish dreams of freedom without realizing that that freedom came at the expense of others. 

“Yes,” he said finally. “My sister is a mage, but I haven’t seen her in many years.” It was a lie, but though his memories of Varania as a child were still hazy, he knew somehow that she had been different before Danarius had tainted her. “And I have – had – a, um, friend who was a mage,” he added, knowing she must have seen Anders in the Gallows dungeon and would remember him – or remember Justice – even in her magebane-addled state. 

She picked up the crumbs from the bread with a damp fingertip and ate them, a thoughtful look on her face. “I thought you must.” 

“Why would you say that?” he asked, not bothering to soften his voice this time. He felt himself sitting up straighter, spine rigid against the stone window frame. 

“Well, you’re always helping us, aren’t you?” She chewed her lip, pushing the picked-clean bits of apple core around on her plate. “I don’t mean any offense, Messere. It’s just that… I don’t know if you remember this, but you saved me from being kidnapped by slavers. Me and some of the others.” She gave a nervous little laugh. “I was scared to death of you at first, and I ended up having to go back to the Circle anyway, but at least I didn’t die! Or get taken away from Kirkwall.” 

The Viscount of Catwall was twining around her ankles, and she leaned over to scratch him between the ears. “And then when we were in the dungeon and could hear those… horned men fighting with the templars, there you were again! So, I thought maybe you tried to look out for mages, because you knew one yourself.” 

What could he tell her? That he’d stumbled stupidly into helping her both times, because he’d wanted to kill slavers the first time – without knowing whom he was rescuing – and because he’d been a lovesick dupe the second? That he would have been happier if she and all the other mages downstairs were safely locked behind thick granite walls and iron portcullises again? 

“But I’ve taken up enough of your time, Messere,” she said, giving the Viscount of Catwall a final pat and standing. “Thank you for the food and for everything else.” She gave him a quick bob of her head. “Goodnight, Messere.” 

“Goodnight,” he murmured, watching her reflection in the window steal into the darkness of the hallway. Then he turned his attention again to the streets below, eyes straining through the night for a tall, lanky figure, dark and thin as an ink mark against the pale paving stones. 

****************

Fenris awoke the next morning with his cheek mashed flat against the cool window pane, his legs asleep from Soporatus’s weight, and his mouth tasting as if he’d drunk the contents of the Hanged Man’s spittoons. In spite of the cat’s grousing, Fenris nudged him off his lap and staggered to his feet, muscles cramped from sitting upright on the hard window seat all night. From below came the unfamiliar sound of people stirring, muffled voices, distant footsteps. Perhaps he should have felt more annoyed by Cullen and the mages taking over the mansion, but it wasn’t as if he owned it – he felt bothered by the loss of privacy more than anything else, but he would be gone soon enough and if the mages wanted to watch him drink himself into a stupor until then, they were welcome to it. For the moment, they were between him and the rest of his wine, so he supposed he’d have to face them. 

Downstairs, it looked as if the main hall floor had sprouted mushrooms to match those in the foyer, albeit gigantic ones shaped like sleeping mage apprentices wrapped in their robes. He picked his way among their huddled forms and headed toward the door to the cellar. Before he could open it, though, he heard a voice, a low, steady muttering, its words punctuated with pacing footsteps that made the rotting floorboards creak. His hand hesitated on the doorknob – he wanted less than nothing to do with any of the people now inhabiting what he’d once considered his home, but he didn’t relish the idea of a disturbed mage bringing the whole mansion down on their heads either. With a sigh, he headed in the direction of the muttering. 

Cullen paced back and forth in front of the kitchen fire, gesturing as if he were trying to explain something to someone. The sweat gleaming on his forehead and rolling down his cheeks seemed to have little to do with the heat of the fire, and he appeared to notice it as little as anything else in the room. 

“It is not them,” he murmured through clenched teeth. “They are mages, but they are not _our_ mages.” Not pausing in his pacing, he buried his face in his hands, and even from across the room, Fenris could hear the roughness of the templar’s breath against his palms. “Our mages are still under control. They will be controlled… they will be….” 

A light touch on Fenris’s arm startled him away from watching the quietly raving templar, and he turned to find the First Enchanter standing beside him. 

“He is not well,” Orsino said, voice soft. “I understand that he was tortured by blood mages during the uprising at the tower in Ferelden.” The First Enchanter darted a quick glance toward Cullen and then looked down, shaking his head. “He believes the Qunari mages are responsible for what happened at the Gallows.” 

“But you know differently,” Fenris said. His blood felt gelid in his veins, as if Orsino had cast Cone of Cold and caught Fenris in one of the spikes of ice. He knew the truth already, had known it since Orsino hadn’t blinked an eye when they’d returned without Anders, and yet he wanted to hear it, as if the First Enchanter’s admission would somehow thaw him, free him. 

“Yes,” Orsino replied, and again he glanced toward the kitchen, where the sound of Cullen’s muttering was now interspersed with ragged, poorly stifled weeping. “But it is better if the Knight-Captain does not. It would be better for all of us if he continues to believe the Qunari were to blame. Kinder for him, safer for the mages.” 

“And for you?” Fenris asked. He was clutching at the doorframe, the wood splintering beneath his gauntlet – it was either that, he thought, or his hand would be gripping the First Enchanter’s throat or plunging into his narrow chest. “You helped him.” He couldn’t bring himself to speak Anders’s name, not out loud – he couldn’t trust his voice. “You _knew_.” 

“I did,” Orsino said – he sounded tenser now, less unctuous and sure of himself than he usually did. “He did enlist my help, and I provided it.” He raised a frail hand as if trying to forestall any answer from Fenris. “As an alternative to the Circle being annulled, if the Divine granted the Knight-Commander’s request.” 

The wine from the night before flooded over Fenris’s tongue, sour, acidic as if it could etch the soft flesh of his mouth and throat. The lying he’d almost become inured to – though he’d only known of it in that brief tug of magic on his markings before the explosion, it seemed an old pain already, perhaps because he’d always expected it on some level. But the idea that Anders had trusted Orsino – a stranger, worse, a stranger Anders had been contemptuous of – over him, had sought Orsino’s help while keeping Fenris in ignorance made him feel as if he had phased his hand into his own gut and was plucking his organs out like fruit. As if Fenris wouldn’t have offered his aid if Anders had asked, as if he hadn’t already compromised himself again and again in the simple act of loving a mage. 

His knees quivered beneath him, and he caught himself on the doorjamb. Orsino gave him a concerned frown, but to Fenris, there was a mocking gleam in the First Enchanter’s eyes, the faintest smirk at the corner of his thin lips. The poor idiot slave, the illiterate messenger boy, delivering letters that he couldn’t read. All those times he had gone to the Gallows to find Orsino’s office empty – the First Enchanter must have been meeting Anders, who had sent Fenris on a fool’s errand to get him out of the way. Even on that last night, before Fenris had let him…. 

He took a deep, quavering breath, trying to choke down the vomit rising in his throat, but his nostrils were suddenly filled with the scent of Anders’s skin and hair, clover and fresh milk; the lyrium and elfroot tonic of his breath; the faint briny bitterness of his come. His tongue curled, and he stifled a gag, pushing past Orsino and heading for the main entrance with the back of his gauntlet pressed to his mouth. He had to forget all of it, whether it took drowning himself in Hanged Man rotgut or begging the Qunari for some of their _qamek_.


	34. Chapter 34

Weeks passed, and yet the memories did not lessen. They weakened, perhaps, like marks wiped ineffectually from a slate, fainter but still intelligible. If Danarius had not been rotting on the floor of Kirkwall’s bay, Fenris would almost have welcomed the magister’s dabbling in blood magic, if only so the pain of his experiments could burn away Fenris’s memories as they had the first time. Wine and rum were poor substitutes – he often forgot stumbling home through Hightown’s quiet streets, now quieter under the rule of the Arishok, but he still awoke in the night, reaching for Anders, seeking the mage’s warmth beside him.

Even if he weren’t being plagued by the mage’s ghost, Fenris told himself he still would have been trying to avoid the mansion. Every day, Orsino trained the mages for hours, and the proximity of their magic made his markings itch, even when he was up in the tower room – it was like being bitten by an indecisive flea, as the mages fumbled with their spells, lost their connection to the Fade, and cast again. Being bitten by actual fleas at the Hanged Man was preferable – they at least were experts at what they did and only wanted one’s blood for sustenance, not to use it to make pacts with demons. Fewer drunkards lolled about on the tavern’s stained benches now, and Fenris had received more than one disapproving look from the Ben-Hassrath who patrolled Lowtown making sure their new converts were adhering to the principles of the Qun, as he’d staggered out of the Hanged Man, blinking painfully in the bright morning light. 

He wasn’t the only one slinking back to the mansion at odd hours, though – despite the fact that dozens of mages were working magic there at all hours of the day and night, Fenris often saw Cullen slipping in the former servants’ entrance at strange times. Perhaps he knew that one templar had no chance if all of the Circle mages became abominations, though Cullen had always struck him as one who would cling to his training until the very end, even if that end came on the hooked claw of an abomination. When Fenris had asked him as much, though, Cullen had stuttered out something about trying to find any templars who had survived the fight in Hightown and that he trusted Orsino with looking after the mages. After that, Fenris assumed he was spending his time and his coin at the Blooming Rose. The brothel had been a popular spot with templars and templar recruits, according to Anders, so Fenris’s guess and Cullen’s story might have met somewhere in the middle. 

Fenris didn’t care enough to pursue the matter – he had his own worries, even if those were now mostly how to scrape together enough coin for the next bottle – until he came upon the templar in the abandoned storage room just inside the servants’ entrance one night, shivering as he peeled off his blood-spattered tunic. 

“I thought the Qunari had cleared the streets of bandits,” Fenris said, trying not to smirk as Cullen jumped at the sound of his voice and clutched the tunic to his bare chest, leaving faint smears of blood on his pale skin. 

“I—yes, well, I went to Darktown on a lead that some templars were hiding out there, and you know how the citizens of Darktown are with outsiders wearing swords,” he stammered, lowering his head to rub at the back of his neck and avoiding Fenris’s eyes. 

“Hm,” Fenris replied, raising an eyebrow that set Cullen to stuttering out more excuses, and left the templar to change his tunic with trembling hands. As he collected a bottle of wine from the cellar, he resolved to forgo the next night’s drinking and follow the templar on his excursions into Kirkwall. That night, Cullen seemed to be wearing only the blood of some unlucky foe, but he would not always be so fortunate, and Fenris couldn’t risk being left in charge of a Circle’s worth of mages. He could have just left Kirkwall entirely, of course, and let the Qunari and the people of the city deal with a disaster that was much more of their making than it was his, but conscience pricked him, a persistent needle stabbing through the pleasant haze of perpetual drunkenness. 

Though none of the mansion’s other inhabitants aside from the cats seemed to take much notice of his comings and goings, Fenris made as if to head for the Hanged Man the following night. Instead he slipped around the corner from the servants’ entrance and concealed himself in the sharp shadow cast by the mansion’s marble façade. His hands were shaking, and sweat was beginning to slick his forehead – he had almost decided to go to the Blooming Rose for a cheap glass of wine to take the edge off long enough for him to make the descent down the staircase to Lowtown, when the servants’ entrance swung open with a groan of rusted hinges and Cullen stepped out. He was dressed in another non-descript dark tunic, but when he passed Fenris’s hiding place, Fenris could hear the soft clink of chainmail, and Cullen’s sword, its pommel wrapped to hide the templar engravings, rode on his hip. 

Fenris waited until Cullen had disappeared down the staircase to the Chantry Courtyard before taking up the pursuit, always keeping to the shadows, close against the buildings. The soft slap of his bare feet on the paving stones was swallowed by the thud of Cullen’s boots, and the templar seemed to be completely unaware that he was being followed. His head swung from side to side, looking up and down the various alleys and streets, but he never once looked over his shoulder, and – more confusingly – he seemed to have no destination in mind and instead wandered through the dark Hightown squares and boulevards, working in ever-shrinking circles around the Keep before retracing his path. 

After three circuits, Fenris’s footsteps were flagging. He wasn’t fatigued so much as gripped by thirst – he had abstained from wine before leaving to keep his senses sharp and his hands steady in case Cullen was ambushed by bandits, and yet here he was with quaking hands, a dry mouth, and a mind so overwhelmed by his craving for wine that he could scarcely think of anything else. When the now-widening circle of Cullen’s path strayed near the Red Lantern District, Fenris ducked into the Blooming Rose. The night had been quiet so far, and he doubted that that would change. Perhaps Cullen wasn’t up to anything other than getting a breath of fresh – or fresher, Kirkwall was filthy from top to bottom in one way or another – air after too many hours in the dusty, decaying mansion. Maybe the story about the bandits hadn’t been a lie after all. 

The single glass of Madam Lusine’s cheapest red had stilled the juddering of his hands, and he was more than eager to escape the attentions of the Rose’s companions and the strange feeling that at any moment Anders was going to sidle up to him at the bar the way he had so many months before, offering to buy him another drink with an empty coin purse. As little as he liked to admit it, he had scanned the crowd of companions and customers, looking for a gleaming head of wheat-gold hair, a cloud of pigeon-gray feathers. Anders had run to brothels before, after all, when he’d escaped from the Circle Tower. What if he had somehow sheltered from the explosion and, knowing he wouldn’t be welcome at the mansion, reverted back to his old ways and taken refuge at the Rose? 

But that had been before he’d merged with that blighted spirit. Would Justice have let Anders while away precious hours in the company of prostitutes when he could have been spending them healing the sick or shepherding the Circle mages out of the city? A quick burst of resentment jolted through him, making the wine seem to boil in his stomach – if not for Justice, Anders would not have blown up the Gallows and himself along with it. But if not for Justice, Anders himself had said he would never have come to Kirkwall. Fenris hadn’t had enough wine to be able to puzzle through whether he preferred a dead Anders whom he had loved or a living Anders whom he would never have met, and he didn’t have enough coin left to buy any more to fuel that mental task. 

When he emerged from the brothel, Cullen was, of course, nowhere in sight, but he would be easy to find, probably still doggedly following that regular expanding and contracting pattern. The fellow did seem to enjoy rules – no wonder Anders had disliked him so much, even aside from his being in the Order. Fenris fanned out from the square before the Viscount’s Keep, listening for the heavy, even tread of the templar’s boots. 

He was walking past the Chantry Courtyard for the fourth time that night when the burn of his markings flared and hard on its heels came the unmistakable clang of blades. In the deeper darkness among the columns that flanked the courtyard, he could make out figures – two larger and one smaller – struggling, and he raced toward them, unsheathing his sword, his markings alight for the illumination they provided almost as much as for the abilities they granted him. 

In that stark pale blue light, Cullen darted between two Qunari, one blinkered and chained, the other painted with red vitaar and clutching a golden rod in addition to his spear. The Saarebas seemed to be staring at his fists in disbelief, and after that brief burst, no more magic had tugged at Fenris’s lyrium and the air felt somehow deadened, just as it had in the Gallows dungeon when Cullen had hurled Smite against Justice. 

With the Saarebas neutralized, Fenris focused on the other Qunari, slashing across his broad back as he lunged at Cullen with his spear. The Qunari went down heavily, letting out no more than a soft grunt of surprise, and Fenris struck his horned head from his shoulders with a quick swipe of his blade. 

“ _Fasta vass_ , Cullen, are you…?” he trailed off, leaving the question unfinished as he watched the templar advance on the Saarebas. The Qunari mage still had a height and weight advantage on the man, but he was unarmed, weighed down by collar and chains, vision obscured by the mask. It was hardly a fair fight. Blood, looking even more brilliant in the bluish light of Fenris’s markings, made a broad stripe down the templar’s side, and he limped as he walked toward the Saarebas, but Cullen’s hands did not falter as he raised his sword and ran the Qunari through, with such force that the blade sank into the Saarebas’s gut up to the crossguard. There was a sickening, garbled gurgle as the Qunari collapsed to his knees, and dark blood gushed from between his sewn-together lips like water through a sieve. 

Cullen let the Qunari’s dead weight slide from his sword and pulled the blade free, resting heavily on it as if his legs could no longer carry him. Fenris was sure that usually the templar would be tidily wiping his sword clean of blood, but now he simply sagged over it, panting as if he were still in the thick of the fight. With each heavy breath, more blood oozed from his side. 

“It seems you have won the day,” Fenris said, “though I have no idea why you are waging this insane war.” 

Cullen’s laugh was more of a pained cough, and his smile in the dim moonlight was a brief, bitter flash of teeth. “Don’t you? I’m surprised you’re not waging one of your own, considering.” 

Fenris’s face burned, and he was thankful for the darkness – he’d never been sure how much Cullen and Orsino had known of his connection to Anders, and he wasn’t certain why he should have cared. Perhaps it was residual shame carried over from years in Tevinter where such relations were kept quiet and were often reserved only for magisters taking their pleasure with their male slaves. Though that wasn’t what he’d had with Anders at all, not that it mattered anymore. 

“He made his choice,” was all he said. 

Cullen made no answer but crumpled to his knees, his breath shallow and rasping. Fenris sheathed his sword and knelt beside him, taking a healing potion from his belt pouch and uncorking it before carefully tipping it into Cullen’s slack mouth. It was odd to touch someone again after going for so many weeks without – he couldn’t help but compare the texture of Cullen’s stubble to Anders’s, crisp and bristling rather than a fine grit like sand. 

“You are badly injured,” he said, as if Cullen couldn’t feel the sticky warmth of his own blood sluicing down his flank. “Does Orsino know healing magic? Are there any Spirit Healers in the Kirkwall Circle?” He remembered vaguely that a few healers had been made Tranquil on the Knight-Commander’s orders after they’d been unable to heal Viscount Dumar’s mysterious illness. Anders would have made quick work of such a wound as Cullen’s, but the mage had given up one life’s work carried on in obscurity for another that had gained him even less recognition in the end. 

“Come,” he said, reaching for Cullen’s hand to drag him to his feet. The templar’s fingers were cold against Fenris’s bare palm, as if Cullen were wearing steel gauntlets of his own. It felt like plunging his hand through the icy crust on the washbasin water on a cold winter morning. Fenris stifled a surprised hiss and let go of Cullen’s hand to wrap his arm around his waist instead. After a moment, Cullen draped his limp arm across his shoulders and let Fenris hoist him to his feet. 

“There are more healing potions back at the mansion,” Fenris said. “It’s not far – you chose a fortuitous spot to carry out your ambush.” 

“I should die,” Cullen murmured, his breath hot against Fenris’s neck. “It is fair that I should die. Why does the Maker keep sparing me?” His voice caught in his throat, and when he spoke again, he sounded younger, frightened. “I can no longer tell if it’s luck or a curse.” 

Fenris stumbled on the flat paving stones and almost collapsed under the increasingly dead weight of the templar. How many times had he asked the same of himself? On one of his rare visits to the Kirkwall Chantry, he’d haltingly broached the subject with an unseen Chantry brother, who had told him in a slow, deliberate Starkhaven brogue that the Maker alone could see the greater picture and that everything had a greater purpose, even the death of the child killed by Danarius to fuel his blood magic. It hadn’t been much of a comfort to Fenris, who could still feel the warm pressure of the boy’s arms around his neck as he carried him into the triclinium where the guests were assembled, could still hear his terrified cries when the magister stood over him with a bared dagger. 

Still, as hollow as they sounded to him, Fenris tried to recall the Chantry brother’s words now and forced out what sounded like a platitude to his ears, “If you have survived everything that has befallen you so far, it must be that the Marker has a greater purpose for you. Perhaps he means you to restore the Kirkwall Circle or drive the Qunari invaders out of the Free Marches.” He chewed his lip for a moment, the words sour on his tongue as if he’d eaten too many sweets. “Or perhaps there is no reason for anything. The guilty prosper; innocents die – perhaps there is no meaning behind any of it.” 

Cullen laughed, a short, breathless yelp made hideous by the soft bubbling of blood in his throat. “You would never make a Chantry brother, Serah.” His breath rattled in his chest as if speaking had winded him. “You are far too honest for it.” 

He was quiet the rest of the way to the mansion, apart from pained grunts when Fenris jostled him too much. The estate was dark, and no magic pricked at Fenris’s markings like hot needles. They skirted the main hall, filled with the snores and soft weeping of the mages and apprentices, and headed for the kitchen. Anders had kept the cupboards there well-stocked with elfroot, healing potions, and other tinctures, but though Fenris had spent hours in the clinic before the templars had razed it, he knew little more than how to turn all the bottles so their labels faced forward and how to roll bandages. As he rifled through the shelves and cupboards, he wondered if Cullen had been there when the clinic had been stormed or, worse, if he’d ordered it. He didn’t strike Fenris as the type to enjoy the sort of petty, wanton destruction that he’d seen at the ruined clinic and probably would have discouraged the templars under his command from it as a waste of their time and energy. 

“Take off your tunic,” he ordered, trying to use the tone of gentle authority that Anders always had with his more difficult patients, but he was certain he just sounded cold, flat, brusque. Well, perhaps he was. Whatever Cullen had been doing was foolish, reckless, though Fenris couldn’t deny that he had probably done something similar when faced with Tevinter slavers. Yes, he’d run to Anders for healing more than he cared to admit, but before he’d met the mage, he’d sewn up his own wounds, stolen healing potions, and didn’t squander energy or thought on whether a sword to the ribs was the Maker’s will or not. 

Laboriously, Cullen peeled off his tunic, revealing a deep slash streaking across his pale abdomen like a red shooting star. The bleeding was slowing, at least, drying in dark patches and flaking off when he moved. 

“Are you certain you do not want me to fetch Orsino?” Fenris asked, slipping off his gauntlet and grazing his fingertip along the jagged margin of the wound. The skin there was already turning an angry pink, but Fenris couldn’t tell if it was from the initial trauma of the spearhead shearing through the flesh or something else. Something worse. The Qunari had no qualms about painting their own skin with poison, so the Maker alone knew what they might have coated their swords and spears with. 

“The First Enchanter couldn’t heal a paper cut,” Cullen replied, wincing at Fenris’s touch. “I would not have them know I am weakened, you understand?” He looked up at Fenris, a pleading light in his saltwater-brown eyes. “They might take advantage. I must maintain the appearance of strength.” 

“I’m sure you will make an extremely stalwart corpse,” Fenris said. He turned away and selected a few bottles from the shelves – he thought he recognized the words written in Anders’s script on the labels, but he would have to smell them to be certain. “If you survive the night, perhaps we can find someone in the city who could…” He trailed off. There was no one. Anders was gone; the Dalish were too far outside of the city; and surely no apostate, even if Fenris could root one out, would be willing to help the second-highest-ranking templar in Kirkwall. “I will do my best.” 

“You’ll never make a healer either,” Cullen said with a laugh that was more than half wheeze. His face went somber, the faint lines etched by his pained smile lingering too long around his eyes and mouth. “Thank you, Fenris.” 

Fenris handed him one of the potions and watched him gulp it down. The templar’s gratitude made an itch start up between his shoulder blades. That it appeared to be sincere made him that much more uncomfortable. Gratitude could lead to expectations – of further aid, of future friendship – and Fenris was unsure whether he wanted to provide either. The last encumbrance keeping him in Kirkwall had turned to ash and smoke on the Gallows – why would he want any new ones? And yet already his limbs felt heavier, as if invisible chains were coiling around them and locking into place. 

Trying to mimic actions he’d seen Anders perform hundreds of times was somehow comforting – grinding elfroot in a mortar and pestle, imagining that he could still feel the warmth from Anders’s palm in the heavy stone pestle; bathing Cullen’s wound with warm water and then with boiled wine even as he regretted the loss of the wine; threading one of the fine copper needles the mage had used to stitch up wounds when he was low on mana. Color started to return to Cullen’s face after the second healing potion, though it was a too-bright, hectic red that burned high on his cheekbones, and he gritted his teeth and made no complaints as Fenris sewed the wound closed, packed it with elfroot, and girdled him with bandages. 

“Maybe you should become a tailor,” Cullen murmured as he watched Fenris wind the linen bandages around his abdomen. “You have a very neat hand with a needle.” 

Fenris ignored the praise – he knew Cullen was just being friendly, but he still, perhaps foolishly, disliked such commentary on his skills, be it his blade work or his needlework. It reminded him too much of the lingering, appraising gazes and too-familiar hands of Danarius’s associates, squeezing his muscles, cooing over him as he practiced the sword, exclaiming over his markings when they lit him like a pale torch and let him sink his fist through solid flesh. He didn’t like being valued only for his usefulness, even as he recognized that that was once all he’d wanted, what had kept him alive, and moreover that it was common even for free men, that Anders had been valued by the citizens of Darktown for his healing abilities, that Cullen must have been promoted so rapidly in the ranks of the templars for… something. His willingness to be led, perhaps, or his unquestioning acceptance of rules. But for all of his life that he could clearly remember, Fenris had only been valued – with an actual monetary worth laid on him, no less – for what he could do, rather than who he was. Was there any value in that, though? In just being? Anders had thought so. 

“How many Saarebas have you killed?” he asked, and the hesitant smile that had quivered at the corners of Cullen’s mouth disappeared. 

“Two now,” he replied, not meeting Fenris’s eyes. The orange light of the kitchen fire licked at the crests of his cheekbones, betraying their flush. Was he embarrassed at taking his misguided vengeance into his own hands, or was he ashamed that in doing so, he was shirking his official duties? “And their keepers. I thought I could handle two of them at once, as long as I could Smite the mage.” He laid his hand flat over his bandaged wound; red stars of blood burned through the layers of linen at the pressure. “Clearly I was mistaken.” 

“The Qunari will send them out better-protected,” Fenris said. “When will your vengeance be satisfied? The Saarebas who destroyed the Gallows—” The lie came easily to his lips, unsettlingly so, maybe because he wanted it to be true, “—died in the explosion. From what I understand of the Qunari, their mages are more closely watched than your Circle mages. What do you hope to achieve with this?” 

Cullen clenched his fists, staring down at them as if they belonged to someone else and were being raised against him, and then lifted them to grind the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. “I don’t know, I don’t know!” he cried, voice ringing with tightly controlled anger. “I just feel that I must do _something_.” 

Was Fenris’s own need for revenge as unfocused? As much as he hated mages, he had not indiscriminately killed them, even when Anders, in their earliest encounters, had so obviously invited it. No, he had always been focused on Hadriana and then Danarius, as if she were a chess piece that needed to be taken in order for him to capture his opponent’s king. Yes, he had cut down his fair share of slavers, but they were pawns in Danarius’s – or, rather, the entire Imperium’s – game and had chosen a life of stealing others’ freedom, feeding the Imperium’s insatiable need for bodies to work to death, bodies like his mother’s and nearly his own. Perhaps it was because the wrongs had been done to him directly, rather than to people he cared about or at least felt responsible for. If Anders had been killed by Saarebas magic, would he be doing the same, stalking the Hightown streets to murder mages who had taken no hand in Anders’s death? Orsino’s fears that Cullen would turn on the mages if he knew the truth suddenly seemed all too rational. 

“You must rest now,” Fenris replied. He selected a bottle from the shelf, full of a milky white substance he’d seen Anders give to patients to make them sleep, and poured a dollop of it into a goblet. “This will help.” _If it doesn’t kill him. I am no healer, just a fool who couldn’t take his eyes off of one._

Cullen tossed the medicine back with a grimace. “We will have to face the Saarebas and the rest of the Qunari someday,” he said, smacking his lips as if trying to rid his mouth of the potion’s taste. “The weaker they are when that day comes, the better.” He grabbed hold of Fenris’s arm, and his hand felt even colder than before, a steel manacle on a winter’s day. “Will you help me, Fenris?” he asked, his gaze feverish, though that could have been the flicker and dart of firelight in his eyes. “It will be better for the mages if you do.” 

Why should he think that that would sway Fenris at all? And why, Fenris wondered as he wavered, did he have this prick of conscience, this loyalty to a dead man who had done nothing to earn or deserve it, this worry about what choice would be more likely to gain Anders’s approval? Work with a templar in order to possibly help mages? He opened his mouth, fully intending to tell Cullen that he didn’t care, that the labyrinthine entanglements of southern mages and templars meant nothing to him, but instead he heard himself say, “Rest. We will discuss it when you have healed.” 

That seemed to mollify the templar, and Cullen let Fenris help him up the long, sagging flights of steps to the tower room and settle him onto the lumpy, stained hay-filled mattress Fenris had dragged up from one of the downstairs storerooms to sleep on. The sleeping draught took hold almost as soon as Cullen lay down, his face going slack, eyes rolling behind their closed lids. 

Fenris curled up on the window seat, but sleep would not come to him. His hands were on the verge of trembling again; nausea quivered to life in his stomach and radiated through him in waves like ripples on the surface of a pond, thick saliva coating his mouth. The wine bottles heaped in the corner of the room were all empty, already dusty, a spider weaving a thread of web from the mouth of one of them to the nearby wall. 

It felt like another betrayal to be up in that room with a templar, though what were betrayals to the dead? All of Anders’s betrayals had been done directly to Fenris’s face, his body used as a distraction, his words saying only what Fenris would want to hear, a lemon dipped in sugar, bitterness hiding behind a veneer of sweetness. He knew if he was going to help Cullen, he couldn’t be in his cups at all hours, trying to drown himself in wine in order to forget. That quick glass of red at the Blooming Rose had made him sharper, clearer, though, and he was about to creep downstairs to the wine cellar when Cullen cried out in his sleep, thrashing on the thin pallet. 

Fenris knelt beside him, holding him down by the shoulders as firmly as he dared in an attempt to keep Cullen from tearing his stitches. The templar let out a soft whimper, his breath coming in rough pants through his clenched teeth. 

“No! Leave me… leave me…” he spat before trailing off into unintelligible murmuring and quiet, hiccupping sobs. 

Cullen’s sweat slicked Fenris’s palms as he pinned him to the mattress, but the templar’s blindly grasping hands were still cold even through the spirit hide of Fenris’s leggings when they brushed against him. Perhaps he should go and find the First Enchanter – surely a Circle mage would know more of the oddities of southern templars than a slave from the Imperium. But something about Cullen’s choked cries and crimped brow reminded him of Anders in the thick of one of his dreams of the Archdemon, and he sank to the floor beside Cullen, laying one arm across his shoulders to keep him down. With Cullen’s breath smelling of elfroot from the sleeping potion and his muddled, sleepy groaning about demons filling Fenris’s ears, it would have been easy to close his eyes and pretend it was Anders there beside him. The prospect was like seeing one of Danarius’s famous banquets laid out after weeks of being served only weevil-filled bread – immensely tempting and yet fraught with the knowledge that indulging in that temptation would only lead to pain. 

“Shhh,” he murmured, trying to make his voice low and soothing, the rumble that he could feel in his own chest and that Anders would turn toward even when his eyes were squeezed shut so tightly it was as if the fragile skin of his eyelids were the only barrier holding his nightmares in the Fade. 

Cullen bolted awake, sitting up as much as the weight of Fenris’s arm would allow before sinking back onto the mattress. He struggled feebly against Fenris’s hold for a moment as if whatever demon haunted his sleep were still clinging to him. Finally, his eyes cleared and focused on Fenris’s face, a few heavy blinks wiping away the fogginess that had clouded them like breath on a window pane. 

“Maker!” he panted. “I was… I must’ve…” His adam’s apple bobbed in his throat as he swallowed, and he raised a trembling hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “I apologize for disturbing your rest,” he finished weakly. 

Fenris drew away, sitting up and resting his crossed arms on his knees. “You are not well, and it is not merely your wound.” 

Cullen pushed himself up onto his elbows, head bowed. “No, it isn’t,” he admitted. 

“You asked for my help with your crusade against the Saarebas, but your condition would put us both at risk. What is it?” 

“I would not think you were one to worry about self-preservation,” Cullen said, a tiny smile tipping up the corner of his mouth. “I’ve seen you fight.” 

Fenris gave him a flat stare in reply, and after a long moment, Cullen sighed, shoving his fingers into his sweat-damp hair. “Very well. I have been unable to take lyrium as often as templars are meant to.” At the mention of lyrium, Fenris edged away from him, as if Cullen could smell it in his skin. Cullen didn’t seem to notice, though, and went on, “There are… withdrawal effects. Headaches, nightmares—” He disentangled his fingers from his curls and stared at his open palm as if the list of symptoms were written on it. “—cold hands. I’m told they improve eventually, if I don’t lose my mind first.” 

He sounded strangely matter-of-fact about possible imminent death, considering his youth, though Fenris knew he would have sounded quite similar – surviving torture made death, if not welcome, somehow less frightening. 

“And yet you can still Smite the Saarebas?” he asked. The two of them could certainly manage two Qunari, but they could decidedly _not_ overcome a mage in full control of its powers _and_ a Qunari warrior. He doubted either of them would survive long enough to even land a blow. 

“For now,” Cullen replied. “I have been rationing the little lyrium I have left and taking it before I go out… hunting, I suppose you’d call it.” Fenris could make out the brief glint of the whites of his eyes in the dim room as Cullen glanced over at him and then quickly looked away again. “There is your answer to when my need for vengeance will be satisfied, though it will be out of necessity more than anything.” 

“Were they your friends?” Fenris asked, his words stirring the silence that had fallen between them as his fingers stirred the dust on the floorboards. “The templars under your command?” 

Cullen laughed, his smile a bright crescent moon in the darkness before quickly waning. “No. They, ah, didn’t care much for me, I’m afraid. But I was their captain. I would like to think they trusted me and had faith in my decisions. The fools.” 

The nightmares must have been powerful enough to undo the effects of the sleeping draught Fenris had given him, for the templar seemed wide awake now and little inclined to go back to sleep. He propped himself up on one hand, scrubbing the other over his face as if brushing the sleep from his eyes, and when he spoke, his voice faded in and out, muffled by the movement of his hand. “I owe you an apology for my behavior in the tunnels,” he said. “I should not have threatened you with the noose. I was just… startled, I suppose. Your friend brought back unpleasant memories for me.” 

“I know,” Fenris replied, hoping the flat disinterest his voice would discourage any further conversation on the subject, but Cullen was shaking his head, his hand rubbing the back of his neck in the gesture that Fenris had come to learn meant that he was feeling self-conscious or sheepish. Or awkward. The fellow did it so often that Fenris wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that the nape of his neck was armored with a thick layer of callus. 

“I do not agree with the Knight-Commander on the policy of hanging those who shelter apostates. They are often helping friends, family, their own children—” He gave Fenris a nervous, sidelong glance. “—their, uh, I should say, those they feel, um, romantically inclined toward….” 

Fenris blinked, flinching as if Cullen had slapped him, and hoped the templar hadn’t noticed. So he had not hidden the nature of his relationship with Anders well enough. Was it written on his face, carved into his flesh like the lyrium? “I see.” 

“When I was at the Circle in Ferelden, my fellow templars didn’t care much for me either,” Cullen continued, “but there it was because I preferred to talk to the mages.” He turned his face toward the window, moonlight glazing the high planes of his cheekbones, the straight line of his nose, but he seemed to be gazing at something far, far beyond the tiled rooftops of Hightown. 

“I know what it’s like to fall for a mage in spite of yourself. There was a mage at the Tower in Ferelden who I… I thought perhaps…” He bowed his head again, blinking down at the bandages wrapped around his waist as if he’d forgotten they were there. “She became the Hero of Ferelden, you know? She freed me from the prison Uldred and his blood mages had put me in. When I came to Kirkwall, I heard that her family’s estate was here, but when I went there, it was empty. Just cobwebs and dust.” He sighed, and Fenris could hear relief in it, along with sadness, as if the telling of his story had been putting down a heavy burden. “I have seen the best of mages and the worst of them, as you have.” 

“You have no idea what I have seen,” Fenris replied, getting to his feet. He felt as if Cullen were trying to throw him a line, as if they were climbing the sheer face of a cliff and Cullen thought being tied together would be safer, but Fenris wanted none of it. He did not need to know he wasn’t alone in his foolishness, would indeed prefer that it was never acknowledged by himself or anyone else, especially not this stammering naïve templar who seemed to see no hypocrisy in taking away the freedom of the one he claimed to love. Perhaps Fenris did not believe that mages deserved unfettered freedom, but he would not have been able to deny Anders his once he had come to know him, to care about him. Now, perhaps…. 

“I would be happy for every apostate, every mage, in Thedas to be in a Circle or executed.” He spoke the words with a force he did not feel, as if his former self – still raw from the ritual that had given him his markings, still bruised from one of Hadriana’s beatings – were speaking through him. Cullen looked oddly stricken as he stared up at Fenris, eyes wide in the darkness, their irises swallowed by his pupils. Fenris flushed, coughing into his fist to keep from having to apologize for his vehemence – though he had regretted the content of his words, he did not fully regret having said them or, rather, having been able to say them. “You should rest if we are to continue your… work anytime soon. Good night.” 

He finished with a stiff bow, a habit that he thought he had finally broken himself of, and left, descending to the main floor into the miasma of others’ breath, their snores, their sleepy mutterings, their _lives_. The mansion had once been groaning, dilapidated, collapsing with age and disrepair, the only life in it the mushrooms that sprang from the decomposing corpses and the spiders whose webs were perpetually empty. It had suited him then, suited the emptiness that seemed to expand inside of him, and it would have suited him now even better. Without Anders, he felt as if he were fading, his outlines becoming blurred as they did when his markings were activated, but they never seemed to re-solidify. In the past, he would have sneered at the idea that one became a ghost when not one person in the world cared about one’s well-being, but now he felt wished into existence, and without Anders’s care to moor him to this side of the Veil, he was becoming untethered from it. 

Perhaps joining Cullen in ridding Kirkwall of the Saarebas threat would make him feel solid again, he thought as he picked his way carefully through the sleeping mages, heading toward the wine cellar. He’d always felt that way in the days when he was trying to outrun and out-maneuver the slavers Danarius set on him. He could remember the soreness and hunger from his time on the run, the knots in his muscles from nights spent hidden in barn lofts, the blisters that had yielded to hard calluses from walking for a dozen leagues a day or more – at the time they had been painful at worst and annoying at best, but they’d been a sign that he was still alive. 

Three more bottles of the Hanged Man’s cheapest vintage sat in the dust-furred wine racks. He hurled two of them against the far wall of the cellar, barely visible in the dark, the satisfying smash of shattering glass the only sign that he’d hit his target. The third he gathered up and uncorked, taking a long gulp before blindly shuffling through the dark toward the door that led to the abandoned mining tunnels and down to Darktown. The winding path from the mansion’s cellar to the clinic storeroom that Anders had used as a bedroom was well-known enough to him that he could have walked it in his sleep and his feet would still have carried him straight to that rickety camp bed they had tried to share more times than Fenris wanted to think about. 

The storeroom looked much as Anders – and the raiding templars – had left it, cot on its side, empty potion bottles smashed, old crates turned to splinters, all of it covered with a thick layer of dust and the intricate lace of new cobwebs. He righted the camp bed and sat down, cross-legged, clutching the wine bottle. He could hear the slap of the bay on the stone face of the cliff outside, the distant grind of the Lowtown foundries, and as he drank, he tried to conjure Anders’s voice into that tumult, but any shade that the mage had left of himself in the world when he crossed into the Fade remained silent, no warning about the futility of fighting the Qunari, no disapproving scolding for wanting to kill mages who were as much slaves as Fenris himself had been. 

He drained the bottle and left it tipped over on the cot – it rolled into the hollow left by his weight when he stood to leave and dribbled a few dark drops like blood onto the mattress. Anders had been wrong that night they’d first fucked on that narrow bed – Fenris couldn’t just _be_ , any more than Anders had been able to. If helping Cullen kill the Saarebas would fill some of the emptiness inside of him – an emptiness he suspected had been created the first time his memories had been burned from his mind – then that was what he would do.


	35. Chapter 35

The streets of Hightown were silent, a profound sepulchral silence in which even the pad of Fenris’s bare feet on the paving stones sounded loud. After the two Saarebas and their Arvaarads had turned up dead, the Qunari had instituted a curfew. They had been generous with indulging the bad habits of Kirkwallers for too long, the late-night drunken caterwauling outside the Hanged Man and the Blooming Rose, the Lowtown whores plying their trade in alleys, the street corner dice games that usually ended in drawn daggers, but the Qun demanded that those days be at an end. Now anyone found in the streets after curfew was immediately dragged off to the newly opened Viddathlok for a dose of _qamek_ and indoctrination in the ways of the Qun.

The brief skirmishes between Orsino’s mages and the Qunari hadn’t helped either, and they’d all spent a few tense hours in the abandoned mine tunnels below the mansion’s cellar as the Qunari searched every estate in Hightown for the band of mages that worried at them like a pack of terriers nipping at the heels of Mabari war hounds. The mages had moved their blankets down into the cellar, the Tranquil sweeping up the puddled wine and broken glass, and Fenris and Cullen alone were left to rattle about in the rest of the mansion. 

The intention had always been just to whittle away at the Qunari’s numbers – there was no territory to fight for or hold, since mages taking the Keep would either have been turned upon by the very people they’d just freed or been rounded up again and slaughtered as soon as Knight-Commander Meredith rode back into town with the Divine’s signature emblazoned on her Right of Annulment. Orsino and the more experienced mages had formed a rear line for Cullen and Fenris, a rather pathetic frontal assault in theory, but Fenris had been forged to be a weapon as much as any sword ever had and Cullen appeared to have been possessed by Anders’s demon of Vengeance, as if it had gotten lost on its way to the Fade when freed by Anders’s death. Some of the less-experienced mages had been secreted in nearby derelict estates, in clear line of sight of the battle but safe from the Saarebas. 

It had been the best plan they could concoct with their limited time and resources – though Fenris himself had not participated in the strategizing much – and still they took more losses than they could afford. One dead mage was too much by Orsino’s reckoning, and they’d limped back to the mansion ten fewer than they’d been before the fight. Fenris had fought Qunari before on Seheron and seen the Fog Warriors destroy an entire karataam before the Qunari had even had a chance to form ranks, but these oxmen seemed unstoppable. He was sure he’d seen a Qunari fall with a mortal wound only to face the same Qunari again minutes later. Not for the first time, he wished he could differentiate between the magics that tugged at his markings like ocean currents in a storm, first one way, then the other, but he could not. What he did know was that the Saarebas must have learned healing somehow, despite the fact that they had always been used for destruction rather than creation in the past. 

Stranger, though, was the familiar cool brush of healing magic washing over him when he’d lost his concentration and been slashed across the ribs by a Qunari spear. Back at the mansion, he’d unbuckled his breastplate with shaking hands, torn open his tunic – the spirit hide shredded where the sharp steel had caught it – and run his fingers over unmarked skin, not even a scratch from the spear’s point. He held his hand before his eyes as if waiting for the expected blood to suddenly appear on his fingertips, but they remained bafflingly clean. Perhaps one of the Circle mages had cast Health on him, though Cullen and Orsino had doled out Anders’s remaining healing potions among the mages because none of them were particularly skilled in healing. 

If one of the Circle mages had been responsible for his miraculously healed wound, he wished they had come forward sooner and spared him the agony of an entire week spent curled up on the window seat in the tower room, teeth chattering as the tremors that had started in his hands radiated throughout his entire body, leaving him shivering as if he were high in the Frostbacks rather than on the northern coast of the Waking Sea. He had fallen ill the morning after he’d visited Anders’s clinic – maybe some miasma of illness still clung to the very boards of the place, waiting for a victim, or maybe he’d just become sensitive to chokedamp in his time away from Darktown. Whatever the cause, he had woken up racked by cramps. His skin itched from the magic being worked downstairs, but he couldn’t seem to master his hands enough to scratch that itching, and when he did manage to make contact between his hand and one of his markings, his fingers slipped through a sheen of sweat. 

He was dimly aware of strong hands wiping his fevered brow with a cloth, of voices that grazed the edge of familiarity murmuring over him. When he opened his eyes, it was as if he were looking through a pane of glass with grease smeared across it, all indistinct, blurred forms moving in a sea of hazy white light – a slight pale one, and another that made the nausea roil harder in his stomach and his heart flutter even more than it already was, a tall figure with a halo of golden hair and eyes the shade of chestnut honey. Those eyes were the only things he could see clearly, pick out each gilded facet of them, and his mind built a vision of Anders around them, forcing the vague outlines he could make out into a long nose, a sharp jaw, feathered pauldrons. He tried to ignore that the hands that held his head as he drank the potion or tea they offered were oddly cold and clumsy rather than the pleasantly cool, deft ones he was used to. 

Nestled at the back of his mind was a cluster of worries – the mages and the eventuality of them facing the Qunari, Cullen and his scheme for revenge against the Saarebas, who would feed the cats when he left Kirkwall – as perfect and self-contained as an egg, while the rest of his thoughts skittered through his head, disjointed, nonsensical, fragments dredged up from his past, both distant and recent. At times, he felt pinned down by that ball of worry, lying on his back and staring up through the holes in the ceiling at the tiny snippets of cloud-scattered sky, his head immobile as his body trembled and thrashed with whatever illness was wracking him. 

“…this is madness,” a voice was saying, its smoothness marred by the crackle of frustration. “Two swordsmen against the Qunari was ridiculous enough, but even with the mages fighting at a distance, only one warrior is absurd. We must wait for him to recover.” 

“How much longer before the Knight-Commander returns and your chance for freedom is lost?” another voice replied, this one more deliberate, as if the speaker were intently thinking about every word before saying it. “I will honor the deal I made with the apostate, but I can make no guarantees when the Knight-Commander returns to Kirkwall. Then my duty will once again be to the Order first.” 

“If only my years in the Alienage had taught me how quickly a drunken elf can sleep it off,” the first voice said, its sarcasm as dry as a well-aged Agreggio. 

Fenris tried to open his mouth to protest, but all that came out was a croaking whimper. A large palm, rough with calluses that mirrored those on Fenris’s own hands, rested on his forehead a moment before giving it a few awkward pats that must have been intended to be comforting. 

“Three more days, Orsino,” the second voice, now very close, said with a sigh. 

Fenris had spent the next three days mostly vomiting into a basin that was dutifully emptied and cleaned by Cullen – when Cullen wasn’t using it himself. The rest of the time, he drifted between sleep and wakefulness, listening to Orsino and Cullen plan their attack on the Qunari, though those discussions often degenerated into arguments or Cullen’s words being swallowed by a pained groan, which he’d grudgingly admit through clenched teeth was a headache or lack of sleep. 

Anders had kept lyrium potions in the wardrobe in the room where they’d slept, but Fenris doubted that templars used lyrium in the same way that mages did. It even smelled wrong seeping out of Cullen’s pores, like jangled nerves and fever sweat, rather than the faintly sweet, burnt odor that Fenris had sometimes smelled on Anders’s breath after he’d drunk a potion to restore his waning mana. Unnatural, Fenris thought, just as he imagined the lyrium in his own flesh might have seemed to Anders. He’d never asked the mage, though Anders had referred to the scent of it before. At least he’d known it was Anders commenting on its smell – Justice had always been much more preoccupied with the sound of it, the _song_ , though Fenris had never heard anything himself. 

When they’d finally faced the Qunari, Fenris had been as weak as the mewling kittens that the Viscount of Catwall – or the Viscountess, he supposed – had presented him with during his illness, as if her wriggling offerings with their still-shut eyes could cure him. Activating his markings had helped, enveloping him in that eerie calm in which his anger and the death he wrought were distant cares, even as they both fueled the resentment that grew within him like parasite. 

He wished he could disappear into that calm now, as he and Cullen made their way through the dark Hightown streets, let his markings flare alight and focus on the burn of them, but doing so would have made a beacon drawing the Qunari to them. Having Cullen beside him reminded him of the early days of his friendship with Anders, when they’d spent nights hunting slavers at the docks, though Cullen was slightly more stealthy than the mage had been, especially without his heavy plate and mail, and he had none of Anders’s unfortunate tendency toward inappropriately timed chatter, though Fenris had to admit he missed that. The only indication that Cullen was even there was the soft sound of his breath, the quiet creak of his sword belt as he walked, and the faint warmth that radiated from him. 

They had only been out hunting like this a few times and had come up empty when it came to the Saarebas – the Qunari were taking more care with their patrols, and staying out too long in the streets was dangerous – and so their tentative alliance had never been tested against the might of the Saarebas without the Circle mages offering support. At least Fenris didn’t have to worry about them anymore – true to his word, Cullen had let Orsino and the remnants of the Mage Underground funnel most of the mages and apprentices out of the city. Whether they would keep their freedom, be caught and hanged as apostates, or decide that the outside world was too harsh and frightening a place – even in comparison to the brutal Kirkwall Circle – and surrender themselves at the nearest Chantry, Fenris would never know. He was disturbed to realize that he actually cared. 

Orsino and a few of the mages with family in Kirkwall had remained in the city, and a pair of them now waited in the former de Carrac estate. Cullen had recruited them after the first time he and Fenris had killed a Qunari patrol – dead oxmen made heavy, cumbersome corpses to dispose of, and wrestling them over the cliff wall into the bay below had been both risky and time-consuming. The second time they’d ambushed a patrol, the mages had been summoned to dispose of the bodies – it still unnerved Fenris to see how quickly, and with so little blood spilled, magic could take apart a body. Now the Arishok knew that his patrols were disappearing but not where they were being ambushed. 

The Hightown Marketplace was deserted, bereft even of the stalls that had lined it before the Qunari occupation, withered leaves falling in slow spirals from the cluster of trees at its center. Fenris and Cullen took up their positions behind two of the thick, square pillars that lined the peristyle of the courtyard – the Qunari patrols had to pass through the marketplace to reach the staircase that led to Lowtown; it had only been bad luck that every patrol they’d seen so far had been without a Saarebas. 

Soon the heavy thunder of Qunari footsteps rumbled in the courtyard – the patrols rarely spoke among themselves, but stealth was not a Qunari trait. Fenris tracked them by sound rather than sight, staying in the shadow of the pillar, hand gripping the pommel of his sword. He wished that templars showed some sign of their abilities the way mages did – it had been easy to tell when Anders was about to cast a spell, but with Cullen, whether he used Smite or Silence, Fenris had no idea if he had done anything until the affected mage stared in fear and surprise at their suddenly empty hands. Cullen’s lyrium store must have been nearly gone, and with no way to replenish it, this might be their last chance to reduce the Qunari’s Saarebas numbers even more. With the chains still blocking the harbor, the Qunari were as cut off from their reinforcements as Cullen was from his lyrium dust – either more Qunari would arrive over land or they’d come by rowboat from the Waking Sea or they would never appear at all. In light of the curfews, strict rules, and greater protection for the remaining Saarebas, the Arishok seemed to be preparing for the latter. 

The Qunari patrol had almost reached the staircase when it finally came into view – four Karasaads or maybe Stens, Fenris thought, no Saarebas or Arvaarads after all. But then he caught the glint of moonlight on gold – the rod Arvaarads carried to control their Saarebas. He signaled to Cullen and drew his sword. Five Qunari – though he hadn’t yet spotted the Saarebas, even if he could now hear the faint clinking of chains over the pound of their boots – would be no easy kill, but Cullen’s whispered, “It is done,” meant that at least the Saarebas would not be much of a factor. 

They surged out of the shadows toward the Qunari with swords drawn – if the Saarebas had realized he could no longer connect to the Fade, he hadn’t informed his keeper; there was no panicked gurgling, no frantic gesturing. Fenris activated his markings and plunged his gauntlet through the back of one of the Karasaads before the Qunari had even noticed the danger, wrapping his fingers around the Qunari’s spine and wrenching it free of his body. From the corner of his eyes, he saw Cullen sink his sword into the other Karasaad’s back and then struggle to withdraw it as another Qunari – a Sten – advanced on him. 

“The Saarebas, Fenris!” Cullen shouted, finally tugging his blade free of the dead Karasaad and lunging toward the Sten. 

The Arvaarad went down quickly to Fenris’s blade, seeming still shocked by the failure of the control rod. Fenris spun from the boneless heap of the Qunari, markings aglow, to thrust his fist into the Saarebas’s chest, but instead of meeting flesh and metal collar, his knuckles stopped just short of a metal visor, behind which burned two swirling pits of blue fire like twin fireflies trapped in cages. 

“ _Venhedis_ ,” he breathed, blinking as if to clear his vision, to confirm that he wasn’t back on the window seat in the tower room, sweating out alcohol and seeing visions of things that couldn’t possibly be. He staggered backward, his markings guttering as his concentration faltered. It couldn’t be, and yet… how well did he know those vortices of pale flame that seemed to echo the gleam of his own markings? Shock rang in his head like the massive bells in the Chantry tower, drowning out all other sound, and with that shock came a joy, so intense and giddy that he felt sick with it, over-full, as if he might burst. Any anger that he might have felt was gone in that moment, burnt to cinders as he’d thought Anders had been, and as if that self-pitying rage had been holding him upright, his knees drooped beneath him, his bones suddenly feeling wobbly and gelatinous. 

He reached out again, this time tentatively, hand faltering before it could touch the sunken cheeks, the long nose that jutted out from beneath the ill-fitting visor marred by an unhealed scratch across its bridge where the heavy mask rested, the lips that he’d kissed so many times puckered and distorted by the thread holding them together. 

“Anders?” he asked, so softly he wondered if the mage could even hear him. No recognition sparked in the blank glow of that stare, though, and the scent of sulfur enveloped him as black wires of smoke rose from the cracks in Anders’s bare arms and chest. The joy that had filled him fled, not bursting through his skin, but flooding out of him, scouring him clean inside, until he thought there would be nothing left except a very expensive lyrium-embroidered skin. It had been a joy made cruel by its brevity. The joy of being given bread when on the brink of starvation, only to find it laced with poison. The joy of winning a tournament and freeing one’s family, only to have one’s body and mind broken by magic. The joy of being loved, only to discover it had all been false. The joy of seeing a beloved believed dead, only to find no recognition in their eyes. 

His throat clamped shut, so tightly that he could speak no more than Anders – or Justice – could, and he had to glance down to make certain that he hadn’t phased his fist into his own chest and wasn’t clutching at his own heart in some vain attempt to massage it back into life against the shock of what should have been impossible. Should he leave Cullen to the Qunari, throw Anders over his shoulder, and run for the mansion? Or should he finish it? Follow through with the plan and destroy the Saarebas? His markings flooded with light, his fist translucent enough to see the metal of Anders’s collar gleam through it. He thought he could see some indignation in Justice’s eyes, but that would be Justice’s response, wouldn’t it? Self-righteous indignation at being collared and chained, at Fenris not instantly freeing him, at Fenris presuming that he could destroy him. His glowing fingertips pressed against Anders’s chest, sinking into the skin. But even as the tips of his fingerguards pierced Anders’s flesh, he remembered that cool wave of healing magic that had washed over him during the battle with the Qunari. Justice would not have done that – he would have healed the mages who had taken wounds first. Anders was in there, in some hidden corner of that mind and body. If only Fenris knew where, knew how to pluck Justice out or how to let the spirit seep into his own lyrium markings and through them back into the Fade. 

“Fenris!” Cullen’s shout slashed through the haze of indecision Fenris was mired in, and he glanced up to find the templar covered in blood, a dead Qunari at his feet, his face frantic, and one arm raised, pointing at Fenris. 

Before Fenris could respond, something heavy and metallic crashed into the back of his skull, and he sank to the paving stones, his vision filled with the blue glow of Justice’s eyes before blackness engulfed it.


	36. Chapter 36

Anders’s boots slipped in viscous Qunari blood as the Arvaarad dragged him away from the site of the ambush. The Qunari was doubled over, one thick arm clutched around his abdomen, hand still gripping the control rod as the other tugged Anders’s leash. If he hadn’t been weakened by starvation, weighed down by the heavy collar and chains, and in full control of his own body, he might have tried to finish the Arvaarad himself, bludgeon the bastard to death with his blighted control rod. That idea earned a vague sense of approval from Justice, but the spirit made no move to act on it, nor had he let Anders turn to see if Fenris had recovered from the blow he’d taken to the head. Even if he could have cast a healing spell, he wasn’t certain that the spirit would have allowed it. As it was, the effects of the Smite still lingered – it had been strangely weak, not strong enough to stagger him, but he had felt it as soon as it had slammed into him, even from his perch inside his own head, and when Justice had reached for the Fade, it had been gone. Not that it could have helped them now, though, with the collar still on his neck and the control rod firmly in the Arvaarad’s grasp.

_Fenris!_ The name beat a tattoo in his head, matching the rhythm of his footsteps as the Arvaarad pulled him up the stairs toward the Keep. It had definitely been Fenris, albeit a Fenris with pale cheeks and hollow eyes, eyes that went as wide and haunted when they’d stared at him as they had when Danarius had appeared at the top of the steps in the Hanged Man. Still, it was the same face that appeared in his thin, anemic dreams every night – the collar interfered with his ability to reach the Fade even in sleep, when Justice ceded control of their shared body to him – dreams that in spite of their pallid, washed-out quality left him aching. 

He’d battered at the invisible barriers that Justice had walled him in with, confining him to a corner of his own mind. It had been protective at first, to shield him from the terror of being held captive, of only being permitted to use magic at his keeper’s whim, but now Justice’s barriers were controlling him as surely as the Arvaarad’s golden rod. The blackouts he’d suffered before when Justice took over had become longer and harder to anticipate. In the past, Justice had always stepped in during times of great stress, like when they’d tried to rescue Karl, but now hours would seemingly pass and Anders would be unable to recall anything that had happened during them, though presumably his body had been fulfilling his duties as a Saarebas to the Arvaarad’s liking. 

He’d managed to break through once – the first time he’d seen Fenris after the Gallows explosion, during the battle with the mages – and had taken advantage of the Arvaarad’s brief inattention to brush Heal over Fenris. Seeing the Circle mages fall had outraged Justice – and Anders, as well, though he had to admit to himself that he was focused more on the snowy luster of Fenris’s hair as the elf danced among the bulky Qunari, not wanting to lose sight of him in the fray – and they both had added ten hatchmarks to the ledger in their mind of those who would be avenged when they were freed. Another ledger in their shared mind had names on it: the Arishok, the Grand Cleric, Knight-Commander Meredith, the Arvaarad, and now Knight-Captain Cullen – but Anders was the one doing the scribing on that list. 

_Fenris, as well_ , Justice grumbled, and if Anders had had control of their body, he would have stumbled over his own feet. _He was with the templar again. He has been poisoned against us! He would have killed this body if not for the Qunari’s intervention._

Anders had to own it had been something of a surprise to see Fenris hurl himself into the fight against the Qunari alongside Cullen, but he’d hoped, stupidly perhaps, that the elf was taking up his mantle and was there on behalf of the mages, that he was trying to protect them from the Qunari and from the Knight-Captain. He knew little of the state of Kirkwall beyond what he saw in his rare forays into the streets and what he overheard when the Arishok spoke the common tongue. The Qunari surely would have been more panicked if Meredith had returned, and no other templars had fought beside Cullen, so Anders had assumed Fenris was simply being a mediator between the Knight-Captain and the First Enchanter until the mages paid their ridiculous debt to the templar, the debt that Anders himself was partly responsible for. He couldn’t imagine Fenris as a mediator, though. The elf knew proper etiquette – or what was considered etiquette among Tevinter magisters – and he could go through the motions of being polite, but he had no reason to ingratiate himself to Cullen or Orsino. In fact, he had no reason to be in Kirkwall at all, though perhaps that had been true since the day Fenris had ripped his former master’s throat open and left him to bleed out on the floor of the Hanged Man. 

But for Fenris to be out alone with Cullen, ambushing Qunari patrols – that he couldn’t explain. Cullen had always seemed the sort to fall in line with whoever happened to be in power, so Anders was surprised he hadn’t been first in the queue at the Viddathlok to learn the tenets of the Qun. Without the Knight-Commander to lead him around by the nose, he must have been desperate to find someone to prostrate himself in front of. 

_Unless he’s been prostrating himself in front of Fenris_ , a niggling voice whispered, certainly not Justice, who gave a disgusted _harrumph_ before walling himself off from Anders’s thoughts again. From the little Anders remembered of Cullen at the Circle, he seemed to recall the templar having been moon-eyed over Solona Amell, something that Anders had teased her about when they’d been in the Grey Wardens together. Not that that meant anything. Anders himself had been up for everything with anyone when he’d been younger, and being sworn to the Chantry hadn’t kept a fair amount of Kirkwall’s templars from spreading the same case of the pox around the Blooming Rose. _Or Fenris is prostrating himself in front of Cullen_ , the voice went on, _always looking for a new master_. 

A wave of self-loathing washed over him at the very thought, and he dug his fingernails into his palms as if to punish himself for it. He’d never been one to enjoy suffering for suffering’s sake, not like the Andrastians who flagellated themselves to feel what Andraste herself had endured. He wondered if any of them had ever set themselves on fire in pursuit of the full Andraste experience. The early weeks of his captivity as a Saarebas had been torturous, and yet he felt it was punishment that he deserved, unlike his year in the dungeon at Kinloch – deserved not for the deaths he’d caused in destroying the Gallows, but for betraying Fenris, for kissing him in the dungeon corridor and promising him that they’d leave Kirkwall together as soon as Anders had smashed the Circle mages’ phylacteries. 

Justice, who he supposed was a decent judge of such things, had eventually intervened and little by little had taken over, fencing Anders into his own mind as if he were trying to slowly domesticate a druffalo by hemming it into a paddock. There was some relief in relinquishing control, of letting Justice deal with the laconic training of the Arvaarad and the constant pain of the thread piercing his lips. That had been an oversight on his part – he, who enjoyed running his mouth so much, according to Fenris – to make the Qunari agree to not dose him with _qamek_ but not to get their word to not sew his mouth shut. Not that being able to speak would have been of much help, since the Arvaarad seemed to speak only Qunlat in front of him, and none of the other Qunari in the former City Guard barracks would talk to him. It was almost as if he were invisible, except that he could always sense a poorly concealed terror that seemed out of place with their stoicism coming from them when he walked too close. 

The loneliness was the worst punishment of all. He’d had enough of that to last him a lifetime during the year in the Kinloch dungeon, and there he’d had Mr. Wiggums and could at least speak to his templar guards, even if those conversations usually ended with him being spat on or kicked in the ribs. Now, not even Justice would talk to him much, perhaps to keep Anders safely contained. He could feel a strain in the spirit, though, as if Justice were consumed by the effort to keep his presence hidden from their Qunari masters while still acting as a buffer for Anders. He had tried to ask a few times, gently prodding questions, but Justice had only said that he would do as they agreed and not show himself to the Qunari. 

Anders was beginning to realize that he had made quite a few foolish agreements in those hours after the bomb in the Gallows had been activated. Then again, he’d made plenty of foolish agreements before as well, though it had taken seeing the bloodied bodies of the Circle mages in a Hightown square to realize that. Perhaps that chain of foolish agreements stretched all the way back to his childhood like a shoddily paved road, from agreeing to show the other children in his village a magic trick in the hayloft of his family’s barn, to sipping from the chalice of Darkspawn blood at his Joining, to giving up Ser Pounce-a-lot on orders from the Wardens. 

At the base of the wide staircase leading to the Viscount’s Keep, the Arvaarad collapsed, spilling dark blood on the marble steps. The entrance to the Keep seemed as far away as the summit of Sundermount – the Qunari would not make it even halfway up. Maybe they’d be found the next morning, Anders chained to the dead Arvaarad, the opportunistic kites that circled above Kirkwall already feasting on the Qunari’s silvery flesh. He wasn’t sure if he could free himself using the control rod, even if he could figure out how to use the blighted thing. He’d tried to watch closely during the long weeks of training, but the slats covering his eyes left gaps in his vision and he’d never learned anything of use. The collar itself had no visible fastening mechanism on the outside, and the manacles on his wrists prevented him from reaching the inside of the high collar. If he were able to use the rod to connect to the Fade, he supposed he could have frozen the whole blasted apparatus off, shattering the chains that dragged at the base of the collar and left bruises on his ribs and stomach when he slept. 

“If you allow me to connect to the Fade, I can heal your wounds,” Anders heard his voice – or what had become his voice, rough after weeks of disuse and mangled by being forced through sewn-shut lips – say. Why would Justice think that healing the Qunari, their captor, be the just course? The Arvaarad may have been following orders, but the same could be said of many a templar, and Justice had never had any qualms about eviscerating them whenever he had the chance. _A demon will protect its host_ , he thought. _If the Arvaarad dies, any Qunari who find us will kill me for being unattended_. Another unfair, cruel thought. Being left to his own devices was making him paranoid, leading him to distrust those he should have trusted the most, first Fenris and now Justice. 

The Qunari glared up at him with dark, stony eyes that even in their disgust held a gleam of pity. The pity angered Anders more than the disgust – he was used to that, after all, after living as a mage in Thedas. Fear was the only reaction more common than disgust, he’d found. But the pity… He knew the Qunari pitied the Saarebas for their selflessness, for serving even as they struggled to ignore the constant threat of demons, but he didn’t see how the Saarebas had much of a choice in the matter. And, of course, he was undeserving of that pity anyway, since he had succumbed to that peril in a fashion – he was no longer sure how different spirits were from demons, though it had been mostly his idea to merge with Justice. He could hardly count the spirit’s incessant nagging about mages’ rights as the sort of tempting persuasion through the Veil that the Qunari feared. 

_Fenris knows I’m alive now_ , he thought, willing the Arvaarad to use the control device and let himself be healed. _He’ll come for me, if only so he can kill me himself_. But what would Fenris find if he did somehow manage to breach the Keep’s defenses and pluck Anders out? Would he find only a familiar body housing a spirit he loathed? 

The Arvaarad’s clawed fingers twitched around the golden device, and then it activated, the Fade blossoming in Anders’s mind, his well of mana bubbling fresh and sweet as a stream fueled by the spring melt. He cast Heal on the wound in the Qunari’s abdomen, not bothering to be gentle or delicate with it. Justice receded a bit when magic was involved – the spirit could use it when he had control of their body and was lashing out, but it was rough, clumsy, destructive magic, much like the Qunari Saarebas’, and so he left the more intricate spells to Anders. The Arvaarad grunted as the thick slabs of muscle overlying his viscera knit together – Anders would never have purposefully hurt a patient, but he wasn’t going to waste mana on one who kept him blinded, muted, and leashed either. 

As the Qunari sagged against the marble steps beneath him, panting, a sheen of sweat making his silvery skin glitter in the moonlight, Anders leaned over and – making the most of his brief control over his own body – reached for the control device. It was still activated, as far as he could tell – he could still feel the Fade lingering within easy reach – so maybe he could get the Arvaarad to tell him how it worked, at least to unlock the collar. His shoulders and ribs ached from the weight of it, and he felt as if he were being slowly compressed. Maybe soon he would be able to pass as the first dwarf ever to wield magic. 

Before his hand could close around the golden device, the Arvaarad snatched it away, and the wall between Anders and the Fade snapped back into place. Snarling, the Arvaarad activated another mechanism, and the device emitted of flash of blue light, bright as a bolt of lightning on a clear night. Anders’s knees buckled beneath him, though the rest of his body was immobile, paralyzed, glowing blue like Fenris when his tattoos were alight. Pain gripped him, squeezing tight, lungs deflating and heart constricting within that crushing pressure. 

The Qunari rose, slowly, painfully, to tower over Anders, and he didn’t have to see the Arvaarad’s face in the shadows to know the disapproving glower on it. “You were unsupervised, bas-Saarebas. Your control has been compromised. It is the will of the Qun that you should die, and I with you.” 

“Oh, bugger your bloody Qun! I just saved your life, you blighted fool!” Anders replied, pushing the words through a painfully clenched jaw so hard that their force made the stitches in his lips pull. Fear churned inside him – he couldn’t die now, not after Fenris had seen him. If Fenris was still alive, that was. That thought made the fear rise in him, cresting like a fire with dry kindling tossed on it. 

As if summoned by the beacon of those flames, Justice surged forward to drown them, shoving Anders aside like flotsam on the sea tossed by a wave. “I have acted only under your control,” he said, and though it was his own voice, they were Justice’s words. “It would be unjust to destroy me when I have not strayed from the path you and your Arishok have forced me to walk.” 

The Arvaarad’s face, which had remained impassive through Anders’s cursing and what most likely amounted to blasphemy, now tightened. “It is not for you to decide what is just or not, _basra_. There is only right and wrong under the Qun.” He squeezed the control device, and the pain stopped, all of Anders’s muscles that had been held rigid to the point of cramping instantly going slack. “But it is the Arishok’s debt to you that collared you, so he will be the one to interpret what the Qun demands of us.” 

He turned and begin lumbering up the steps toward the Keep, pulling the leash so hard that Anders was almost lifted off his feet. “You may have earned his respect, but the Arishok will not place even a _basalit-an_ above the demands of the Qun.” 

_Basalit-an_? Despite the months of dwelling among the Qunari, Anders hadn’t absorbed much of their language – how many insulting ways of being called a “thing” could there be? And yet the Arvaarad had made it sound positive, as if the Arishok somehow favored him. It was true that Anders had healed him, but outside of that, he couldn’t recall the Arishok speaking to him or even glancing in his direction from atop his throne. And how long would that debt stand? Yes, it had granted Anders his life, such as it was, and he’d done the Arishok’s bidding faithfully since, albeit under the duress of the control device and the collar. Would a simple reminder of Anders healing the arrow to his throat instead of letting him drown in his own blood be enough to stay the Arishok’s hand, even if that meant a deviation from the Qun? He’d sometimes noticed a stubbornness on the faces of the other Qunari when the Arishok gave his orders, as if they knew that what they were being told to do didn’t follow the dictates of the Qun but that disobeying the Arishok would also disobey the Qun. Sometimes the Qun seemed like a dizzying maze to Anders, a maze in which all possible roads led to death. 

Before that night, before he’d seen the shock in Fenris’s eyes that had shifted to anger, to grief, before finally settling on something that could have been love, Anders would have accepted the Arvaarad’s interpretation of matters. A lifetime spent as a passenger in his own head while his body was kept collared and chained and used as a tool made him wish the taint in his blood would get a move on so he could at least die quickly while raving mad. But seeing Fenris again had changed all that. 

_The elf betrayed us_ , Justice grumbled. It seemed unfair that the walls the spirit had erected around Anders seemed to only work in one direction – Justice was privy to all of Anders’s thoughts, but Anders could get just amorphous senses of what Justice was thinking and planning. In a way that was a relief, though, since he was often helpless to intervene, so at least he didn’t have to dread the spirit’s actions before Justice went through with them. Still, he wished he had some idea of what the spirit got up to during those missing hours. 

_We don’t know that for certain_ , Anders replied. _And besides, Cullen is the only other person he knows in Kirkwall now. The templars are done. It’s not like he’s going to put on a dress, down a chalice of lyrium, and take his vows._ He didn’t mention that it was only through his own manipulation that Fenris had met the templar in the first place, though that had seemed like the true injustice to him, as if he’d had to hire his own replacement. _You haven’t been replaced_ , he told himself, wishing he could lift his arm enough to brush his fingers over the spot on his chest that Fenris’s fingerguards had grazed. Guilt jabbed at him when he realized that he’d been glad to see the elf looking a bit worse for wear – the dark rings under the eyes that spoke of sleepless nights, the steeper cheekbones that hinted at meals skipped – it must mean that Fenris had mourned him, maybe was still mourning him. 

_The elf is theirs!_ Justice thundered with a vehemence that Anders didn’t understand. The spirit had always been angry when he thought Fenris was distracting Anders from his work on mages’ rights, but Fenris was no threat to that now. Lacking freedom was the greatest obstacle to continuing their work, not Fenris, who could only haunt Anders’s dreams and occupy his thoughts. 

_Fenris hasn’t belonged to anyone since he ran away from Danarius_ , Anders shot back. He’d never even felt that Fenris had belonged to him, though he knew the elf had loved him and was loyal to him. Fenris had always seemed tenuous, ungraspable, somehow in between two worlds – if Anders had held him too hard, Fenris would have lit his markings and phased through his embrace like water. Still, as he was dragged up the steps to the Keep, the question of why Fenris had remained in Kirkwall nagged at him. Fenris was free now, with no fear of being chased from one end of Thedas to the other by Danarius’s hunters – why would he have chosen to stay in Kirkwall, where madness seeped through the rents in the Fade and every glimpse of the ruin of the Gallows must have reminded him of the mage who had tricked him into loving him? 

  


The Arishok filled the Viscount’s throne, a seat built to be far too large for any human, thick forearms resting on his knees, bent forward as if carrying the burdens of all Thedas on his broad back. He must certainly have been carrying those of the Qunari – he was the head of the Antaam, and yet he’d been stuck Kirkwall for years now, seeking the stolen Tome of Koslun. Perhaps the city was nominally in the hands of the Qunari, but it was an isolated outpost now and most likely useless from any strategic standpoint, while the war with the Imperium must still have been raging on without the Arishok’s guidance. Anders didn’t know much about military leadership or strategy, but it seemed to him that the Arishok was making a Mabari’s dinner of what should have been easy with the templars removed from the equation, and that if he was following the demands of the Qun in his decision-making, it was a wonder that the Imperium hadn’t defeated the Qunari years ago. 

The Arvaarad approached the throne with little of the diffidence one of the former Viscount’s subjects would have had, dried blood staining his torso like dark, poorly applied vitaar. He spoke in Qunlat to the Arishok, no doubt explaining what had happened in the Hightown Marketplace, and the Arishok’s face darkened with every word until finally he cut off the Arvaarad’s words with a curt slash of his hand. Anders didn’t flinch when the Arishok’s stern gaze settled on him, but that was only because Justice still firmly gripped the reins of their body. 

“So,” the Arishok said in that deceptively calm voice, like stone that appeared safe to walk on but would crumble beneath your feet without warning, “you would attempt to doom the Qunari as you did your own people. Even when properly confined. Even when I have allowed you to reopen your clinic in the Undercity. Even when I have given ear to your thoughts on matters with the Chantry.” 

_Matters with the Chantry?_ Anders couldn’t remember ever having spoken the word to any Qunari, much less the Arishok. What had Justice been filling those lost hours with, other than – apparently – working in the old clinic? 

“I have used magic only when ordered to by my Arvaarad,” Justice replied for Anders, and Anders wished he could spit at the spirit’s use of “my”. He knew it was just to placate the Arishok and make him believe that Anders had become entirely their creature – or as much as it was possible for a _bas_ to be. “He allowed me to heal him when he was injured, to prevent my necessary death from following his unnecessary one.” 

“The wisdom of the Qun dictates both of those deaths now. They are both necessary, however regrettable,” the Arishok said, but it was lazy rather than forceful, and not for the first time Anders wondered how much the Arishok believed in this tedious nonsense that he spewed about the Qun and its frankly unrealistic demands. He seemed too aware of the intricacies of bringing a city like Kirkwall to heel to be willing to indulge the wastefulness that the Qun often seemed to require. 

“You cannot spare another Arvaarad or another Saarebas, even a bas-Saarebas,” Justice answered. “You know this. Surely the Qun cannot demand that so many more lives be lost in exchange for these two.” 

“It is not your place to question the demands of the Qun.” The Arishok rose and began pacing the length of the dais. “There are only two paths: to accept and succeed or deny and die. Accepting the will of the Qun can only lead to success, even if at first it appears wasteful to the eyes of an uneducated _bas_.” 

The Arvaarad shifted nervously beside Anders, if a Qunari could ever be said to be nervous. Anders wasn’t sure why the Qunari would fear death – presumably one had to enjoy life to be worried about the loss of it, and the Qunari didn’t appear to enjoy life much at all, unless submitting to the will of the Qun produced some kind of dizzying high in them. From what he’d seen at the Blooming Rose, they didn’t even particularly enjoy sex – it was more like a bodily function that needed taking care of, like going to the privy. 

“And what if you were in my debt once more?” Justice asked. _What debt?_ Anders thought frantically. If the Arishok’s life hadn’t been enough to put him in their debt forever, anything less would be a stop-gap, if the Arishok agreed to it at all. _Perhaps I really have changed Justice as much as he’s changed me_ , he thought. This talk of debts sounded too much like the games he’d played with Fenris when they’d first met, a constant back-and-forth of indebtedness that was originally a ploy to keep the elf from killing him or handing him over to the templars and then became a way of keeping Fenris around because Anders had liked his company, among other things. 

The Arishok tilted his head to one side, the tipping of his enormous, gold-banded rack of horns making the movement appear more exaggerated than it really was. “Speak, human.” 

“The ones who murdered your patrols are known to me,” Justice said. 

_No_ , Anders begged, _no, you cannot do this. This is not just. Fenris has done nothing wrong. Cullen, even, has done nothing wrong, other than defend his home against an invader_. 

_Fenris has betrayed you, my friend. Do you not want vengeance?_ Justice replied. _Many times you have spurred me to action and called it vengeance. Why not now, when doing so will save you?_

Before Anders could tell Justice that he only cared about being saved if Fenris was alive, alive and not an empty-eyed, _qamek_ -dosed automaton, the spirit spoke again, “If you recognize that I was not outside the supervision of my Arvaarad, I can tell you where to find them.” 

The corners of the Arishok’s lips twitched perilously close to a smile, though he appeared more pleased with himself than what he was hearing. “This information is already known,” he said. “Arvaarad has informed me of their appearance and their tactics. We will not be caught out by them again.” He settled heavily back onto the throne, glaring at Anders from under his furrowed brow. Though the Arishok’s eyes were lost in shadow, Anders could feel them weighing him. He would be found wanting, he was sure. He always was. 

“After your work healing the poor of this city, I had a growing lack of disgust for you, but you have offered me this deal out of fear and selfishness. It is the way of your kind,” the Arishok continued, one shoulder hitching upward in a shrug. “It is disappointing, but your fear is unnecessary. My debt to you will be satisfied when I fulfill the demands of the Qun and I can leave this pustule of a city and return to Par Vollen. Until then, you are safe. But do not make me question my respect for you again. A _basalit-an_ can be reduced to nothing more than a _bas_ if respect is lost.” 

He gestured for the Arvaarad to lead Anders away, and Anders went, though his feet dragged on the red carpet of the throne room. Justice had gone quiet, whether mollified or staggered by the Arishok’s words, Anders wasn’t sure. He tried to push against the barriers in his mind, just enough to get control of their shared mouth – which should have belonged solely to him just for sheer amount of use – and ask the Arishok what the Qun demanded of him, but Justice held firm. 

_Why in Andraste’s dimpled arse did you do that?_ Anders demanded of the spirit, whose silence was beginning to border on sulkiness. _They would have killed Fenris or worse. I don’t want that, and I don’t think you do either._

_You do not?_ Justice replied, and his voice as it rumbled through Anders’s head sounded genuinely confused. _But you suspected him of betraying you with the templar. Such a… partnership would bring the elf over to their side._

_I was angry_ , Anders said, wishing that he could massage his brow to soothe away the incipient headache that he’d just have to suffer through, since the Arvaarad would never let him heal himself, but the metal visor was in the way, and he was too tired to lift his manacled arm. _I think things when I’m angry that I don’t necessarily believe and that I don’t want to act on_. 

He would have thought that Justice had learned the difference by now, after years of sharing a body and occasionally a mind, but he’d never handed control over to Justice so completely before either. Justice had been the one who had been a spectator, albeit one who was sometimes drawn into the vortex of Anders’s emotions and desires. Maybe the only ones to catch his notice were those that had dragged him in, while the unacted-upon ones slipped past him. Did the spirit really believe he had been helping, though? Did he know so little of Anders’s mind? _I appreciate you trying to protect me – I doubt I would have survived this Saarebas business without you – but you have to trust me to know my own mind._

If Justice had not been a spirit – had been, say, Fenris – he would have snorted with laughter at that, especially since he had known Anders before they had merged, that Anders who only had strong opinions about cats and templars. As it was, Justice lapsed into silence again, this one slightly more embarrassed – or was Anders imagining that? – than affronted, and busied himself with moving their body, carrying them down the stairs into the barracks, righting them when the Arvaarad shoved them onto the bunk. 

Once Justice would have been a comfort, but now his silent presence just reminded Anders of how much he’d truly lost – every lover, every friend, even the one trapped in his body with him, alienated and driven away. He wanted to be able to shift the blame to someone else – the templars, perhaps, for locking him up in a tower when he was a child, or his father for having allowed that to happen in the first place, or Justice for making him unable to hide his anger behind jokes or drown it with drink. But perhaps the danger, the fault, what he’d tried to warn Fenris about, had been him all along? 

The Arvaarad who watched him sleep came in to relieve the other and took up his place on the bunk opposite, eyes boring into Anders as if he were holding back the demons and chaos Anders supposedly contained by the sheer force of his stare. Anders lay back on the lumpy mattress and waited for the sickly version of the Fade he could still reach in his dreams while collared to draw him into its filmy simulacra of his time with Fenris. 

Tomorrow, he would be shaken awake by the Arvaarad, have a funnel forced between his stitched lips and runny gruel poured down his throat, and then he’d spend the day healing his captors or be taken to the Undercity where he’d heal his former patients who either couldn’t recognize him behind the mask or who had had their minds wiped by _qamek_ and could no longer remember anyone or anything from before their conversion to the Qun. If he tried to speak to any of them, the Arvaarad would correct him or else the person he was speaking to would simply gawp at him with a combination of incomprehension and pity in their eyes. _But in the clinic? Surely I would remember that. Why would Justice want to keep that from me?_ More protection, perhaps, to hold back the memories of the templars bursting through the door, of his work of years being smashed to splinters in an instant. Well, he’d destroyed centuries of the templars’ work in less time than that. 

But how had the Chantry come into it? There had been whispers at the time of Viscount Saemus’s disappearance that the Chantry, fearful of the growing influence of the Qunari, had been involved, but since then there had been, not a truce exactly, but a stalemate of sorts, or at least a mutual disregard between the Chantry and the nearby Viddathlok. Most of the Chantry’s flock, which had always been more Hightown nobs worried about their place at the Maker’s side, was either being held hostage in the Keep or had been forcibly converted, and the residents of Lowtown and Darktown had both gone to the Qun in droves, most of them willingly. 

_What did the Arishok mean about the Chantry, Justice?_ he asked into the sullen silence fogging his head. _He said you had his ear on the subject. Why?_

_I am eliminating the possibility of compromise_ , Justice replied. _If the Knight-Commander returns with an Exalted March at her back and the Chantry is still intact, a new Kirkwall Circle will not be far behind. If the Arishok is convinced that the Chantry is a threat, there will be no Chantry when the Knight-Commander returns._

Anders would not have wept to see Elthina’s head on a pike outside the Keep, and he couldn’t say that he disapproved of razing the Chantry to the ground. There may have been some left in Kirkwall who would have protested, but under the reign of the Qunari, that was what _qamek_ was for. What troubled him was that Justice had carried on these discussions without him, hadn’t even consulted him before or after the fact. The Qunari may have made him a prisoner in his own body, but Justice – the friend he’d sacrificed that body to save – was making him a prisoner in his own mind. 

A bitter smile tugging at his lips, he wondered if Fenris would consider this slavery, if he’d finally judge their suffering to be equal. Not that it was a competition, of course. Maybe this would even help him understand the elf better. Though, as in everything, he suspected that their paths would divert, even if they began in a similar place – Fenris had hated being touched and for good reason, as his markings often pained him, while Anders was a mass of bruises and bones that were even closer to the skin than before, and he longed for nothing _but_ touch. Or a conversation. Or any kind of acknowledgement that he existed outside of his magic. 

He stared up at the bottom of the bunk above him through the narrow slats of the visor, one thumb brushing his bare stomach in half-circles. Shutting his eyes just invited the specter of Fenris’s face earlier that evening to appear behind the closed lids. He had been able to see himself – or Justice – reflected in the widening pools of the elf’s pupils, recognizable only by the fiery blue pits of his eyes. Each time he blinked, it seemed that the memory of Fenris’s expression took on a new cast, now overwhelmed with joy, now twisted with anger. They were all equally possible and all somehow equally terrible. How could he face Fenris again, even a Fenris who was happy to see him, after this latest betrayal, however pointless it had been in the end? And yet, as he drifted off into a pained half-sleep, he wanted little else.


	37. Chapter 37

Fenris awoke to find himself staring up at a canopy of gaudy Orlesian silk, its brightness and hideousness barely tempered by the dust and cobwebs that coated it. When he raised a hand to touch the back of his head, which should have been throbbing with pain, his fingerguards snagged on more silk, equally dusty – he could smell the faintly oily odor of the fabric; it reminded him of Anders when he’d forgotten to wash his hair for a while. _Anders. Maker, had it really been him? Could it have been?_

Thick, sticky blood coated his fingers, but the wound didn’t seem to be actively bleeding. In fact, he hadn’t felt a wound at all. His heart seemed to shudder to a stop in his chest – had it been Anders who had healed him? On suddenly weak arms, he pushed himself up, staring into the darkness around the bed, straining to see the blue radiance of Justice’s eyes. 

“Thank the Maker, you’re awake.” 

Cullen. If the templar was there and still able to speak, that must mean that Anders was gone again, dead on the end of Cullen’s sword or dragged back to the Keep on his leash. Fenris slouched back onto his elbows as Cullen approached the bed, carrying a lantern with most of the shutters closed. In the small pool of golden light it created, Fenris could just make out another figure, dressed in long robes. 

“Where did he go?” Fenris demanded. “The Saarebas we attacked, it was no Qunari. It was Anders.” 

The templar’s brows furrowed. “The apostate? But that’s impossible—” 

“The Saarebas was smaller, was it not? That was no Qunari, I tell you,” Fenris insisted. 

The look of confusion deepened on Cullen’s face – or, if not confusion, of trying to remember something one had heard or read. He chewed on his lower lip, eyes downcast and hidden behind his dark eyelashes, as if the answer he was looking for was written in the garish embroidery on the blanket. “I have never heard of such a thing. Not much is known about the Qunari outside of the Imperium, but nothing in any of the books in the Tower Library ever spoke of a non-Qunari Saarebas.” 

“Not everything can be found in books,” Fenris said. The other figure stepped into the lantern’s light as he spoke – it was one of the Circle mages, of course. She gave him a weak smile as she gently touched the back of his head. 

“It looks to have mended nicely, Messere,” she said. “I’m quite proud of myself – I’ve never had much of a hand at healing.” She brushed some dried blood off of Fenris’s pauldrons and then stepped back, still smiling. The smile turned to a startled expression when she noticed Cullen giving her an encouraging look, and her eyes widened and darted back to Fenris with a hint of pleading in them. All of the mages had treated Cullen like that when they thought he didn’t see them – they were outwardly polite and obedient, while all the while tiptoeing around him as if he were a rabid Mabari. 

“Thank you,” Fenris said, bowing from the waist as he sat in bed. “It doesn’t seem to have even left a bruise.” 

She gave him a short bob of a curtsy in return and scurried off into the shadows again, leaving Fenris alone with a still musing Cullen. 

“You cannot deny what you saw, though,” Fenris prompted. 

“But I can’t be certain either,” Cullen replied. “It was dark, and I was quite busy with the other Qunari, if you recall. All I know is that I saw you staring at that Saarebas as if you were under a spell instead of pulling out its heart like you were meant to.” He paused, bowing his head as if to avoid Fenris’s eyes, and murmured, “As you should have done no matter what.” 

Fenris gritted his teeth – he had had a moment of indecision himself, trying to decide whether Anders should live or die, to figure out which outcome he’d prefer, but he didn’t need or want Cullen’s opinion on the subject. “What became of them? Did you go after them?” 

“No, you were injured, so I was trying to get you back here for healing,” Cullen said. He was regaining some of that old haughtiness that he’d had when Fenris had first met him, an odd combination of hesitation, coldness, and a sort of put-on arrogance that he didn’t seem to feel. Still, Fenris bristled and wished that he were standing, if only so it didn’t seem as if Cullen were speaking to him from quite so great a height. “The leash-holder dragged the Saarebas off. You’d dealt him a significant wound, though, so there’s no saying how far they made it—” 

“You’re forgetting that that Saarebas knows how to heal,” Fenris interjected. “He healed me in the battle against the Qunari.” 

Cullen’s eyes flashed upward to fix on him, glinting gold in the lamp light. “Yes, and that should be our chief concern. We were seen, and this time there were survivors.” 

“There were survivors when we fought them before,” Fenris replied. “More survivors on their side than on ours, if I remember rightly.” 

But the templar was already shaking his head. “There have been skirmishes elsewhere in the city, against other opponents. The Coterie and the Carta are still quite active in the Undercity, from what I’ve heard, so then we were simply one of many.” His face grew serious again, his youthful features taking on that heavy, too-calm cast that always reminded Fenris of the masks Orlesian emissaries had worn when they visited Minrathous. “Now we are two very specific antagonists who have gone after their greatest weapons. We’ll be marked now.” 

Fenris shrugged. “I’ve killed Qunari before. If they come for me, I will kill them again if I have to.” 

Cullen sighed, a put-upon sigh that made Fenris’s hackles rise, as if the templar thought he was being deliberately obtuse, and sat down on the bed beside him. “This added attention will make our… activities more difficult.” 

“There will be no more ‘activities’,” Fenris said. “You are out of lyrium or nearly so, and we will be hunted and rooted out, and for what, Cullen? This is not my fight. It never was.” 

Gilded by the lamp light behind him, Cullen’s profile trembled, brow crimping, chin on the point of buckling. It was a brief tremor before firming again, his jaw clenching. “Then why did you do all of this, if you didn’t care about Kirkwall or the plight of the mages or…?” He trailed off, and when he turned to look at Fenris, there was confusion in his eyes, as if he were genuinely at a loss as to why anyone would fight for something they didn’t believe in. 

Fenris flinched away from that gaze. Cullen’s incredulity made him feel somehow deficient; he’d felt it before, that suspicion that his life as a slave – to say nothing of the ritual that had wiped his memory clean – had left him not quite a person, unable to love, unable to form opinions, unable even to care about anything that didn’t directly involve his own pain. He remembered hearing talk on Seheron about how the Saarebas wanted to be led, and he wondered not for the first time if he was the same, despite everything that had happened since he’d come to Kirkwall that proved otherwise. He stared down at his hands splayed in his lap, at the blood dried black in the joints of his fingerguards. How close he had come to it being Anders’s blood threading through the etched steel. 

“I did it to help Anders. Because he asked,” he said, voice soft. 

“I hope you’ll forgive me for saying so, but doing an abomination’s bidding seems like a poor choice,” Cullen replied, after giving a little huff of surprise that made Fenris clench his fists. 

“His requests didn’t seem any more stupid than anyone else’s,” he said, and Cullen pursed his lips as if realizing he was included among that “anyone else”. “He told me the Circle mages were like slaves and slaves should be free, so I helped him.” He shrugged one shoulder, as if to imply how simple and clear-cut it had all been, even though almost every word he’d just spoken had been a lie. Anders _had_ appealed to him as a former slave, but that had fallen on particularly deaf ears at the time, and Fenris had only unwillingly revised his opinion and then only after Anders was already gone. 

“Well, I will be sorry to lose your help,” Cullen said, not looking at Fenris but speaking into the dark, dusty air. “You’re, ah, very useful with that sword.” 

His voice sounded falsely jolly, a poor attempt at being companionable, though not enough to conceal his struggle with mentioning Fenris’s markings. When Fenris glanced over at him, Cullen’s shoulders were slumped, and he bowed his head, hands clasped between his knees as if he were murmuring a silent prayer to Andraste herself for guidance. 

“I’m not sure what I should do myself now,” the templar went on. “I’ve known my path since I was a child, but now it is far less clear. Perhaps even more so than after my time in Ferelden.” The words hung in the air like a specter, a ghostly companion for Fenris’s own shades. 

“It is not your fight either,” he said. “There is no more Circle in Kirkwall, no more templars. You are Fereldan. You could go back to—” He cast about in his memory, trying to recall whether Cullen had ever told him where he’d come from or, indeed, anything about his life outside of being a templar. Of course, it wasn’t as if Fenris had been forthcoming either. Some of his history could be read on his skin, but otherwise he must have seemed something of a mystery. “—Ferelden and find a Chantry there that will take you.” 

Cullen had begun shaking his head before he’d even finished speaking. “My duty is here. My former Knight-Commander sent me here. I must see it through.” 

Fenris rose and reached for his sword where it was propped against the bedstead. Cullen lifted his head to given him a stricken, questioning look, one that Fenris couldn’t quite understand – it wasn’t just disappointment or frustration, but something almost like hurt in those wide golden eyes. Perhaps the fellow had been friendless for so long that he no longer knew the difference between friendship and whatever sort of mutually beneficial coexistence they had cultivated. Fenris wondered if that was better or worse than simply believing friendship wasn’t even an option, though being relentlessly pursued justified that belief. He still wasn’t sure how he’d gotten stuck with Anders, mired in friendship and then something more, like a hapless insect frozen in tree sap. 

“ _Na via lerno Victoria_ , Knight-Captain,” he said, giving Cullen a polite bow. “Good luck to you.” 

Cullen nodded vaguely, still blinking as if lost. “And to you, Fenris. I hope you are able to leave the ghost of your apostate behind you. I should have.” 

Fenris left him sitting there on the bed and slipped out into the cool night air, the warmth of Anders’s chest still buzzing on his fingertips. Pursuing a ghost was futile, as Danarius’s hounds had learned too well, but Anders was no longer a ghost. 

****************

Years of being the hunted yielded no advantage when he became the hunter. Prowling the streets at night alone was too great a risk, so he fished a moth-eaten cloak out of one of the wardrobes in the mansion – he couldn’t bring himself to don the childlike clothing of the city elves, telling himself that the short pants would reveal even more of his markings – and took to purposefully striding around the perimeter of the Viscount’s Keep during the day. In spite of his strange dress and the awkward gait caused by wearing his sword at his hip instead of on his back, the Qunari ignored him, going about their business with a security that bordered on smugness to Fenris’s eyes. Citizens of the Imperium carried themselves in a way that projected confidence, but it was all for show, just like the webs of magic that held up their fantastical but decaying buildings. The Qunari, however, had no need for such dissembling – no one left in Kirkwall was strong enough to challenge them. Their supremacy was complete and all but unquestioned. 

But Fenris didn’t need to topple the Qunari and wouldn’t have gained any particular satisfaction from doing so. With a power vacuum, Kirkwall would sink into chaos – it teetered on the brink of chaos at the best of times. All he needed was to free one mage, albeit perhaps the most closely protected mage in the entire Keep, maybe even in the entire city. He had spotted Anders once, from where he slouched in the shadows, when the Arishok passed with his retinue, heading toward the new Viddathlok or the Chantry. He had heard whispered rumors that the Arishok had been meeting with the Grand Cleric in an effort to find the rightful Viscount and restore him to the throne, as a Qunari puppet, no doubt. For whose benefit that was, Fenris didn’t know. He’d seen enough political maneuvering in the Imperium to last him a lifetime – it seemed to be nothing but empty words and equally empty gestures. 

The Arishok’s procession was too well-guarded to attack in broad daylight, alone, and Anders and the Arvaarad who held his leash stayed close to the Arishok’s heels, no doubt to throw up a barrier or heal in case of an assassination attempt. As they passed, though, it seemed that the Arishok was stooping slightly to confer with his much-shorter Saarebas, as if they were on a companionable afternoon stroll. Fenris smirked to himself – he knew the Qunari feared the influence of demons using mages as a conduit to touch this side of the Veil, and yet here was the Arishok unwittingly having what appeared to be a pleasant conversation with an abomination. Perhaps Justice was the one behind this conference with the Chantry – the spirit and Anders both had always considered the Chantry as much of an enemy to mages as the templars. 

He could barely see the mage among the bulky silver bodies of his captors – Anders had never been graceful except when casting magic, but now he trudged along, bent like an old, old man under the weight of the collar, the long, stiff kilt worn by the Saarebas wrapped double around his narrow hips and yet still barely clinging to them. When he lifted his head to respond to the Arishok, it was with none of his usual animation. 

The morning sun glinted off his golden hair, picking out the rich ember-like tints of red, honey, amber, and Fenris felt his stomach twist, acid curling his tongue and burning in his chest. He had never loved Anders for his beauty – the mage was, after all, not beautiful, and it had taken many months for Fenris to see him as such – and yet the sight of that coppery gloss gleaming on the mage’s blond hair brought back the physical absence of him, the silkiness of that hair beneath Fenris’s fingers, the way his elbows dug into Fenris’s ribs at night, the gentle nudge of the point of his nose against Fenris’s cheek when they kissed. 

And yet he still felt ambivalent about freeing the mage. He knew it was the right course of action – Anders was the Arishok’s slave and, worse, his magic was potentially being used to harm the innocent, which not only went against Anders’s wishes but was one of the main reasons Fenris himself had, perhaps hypocritically, thought the southern system of the Circles was a good one. Part of him, though, still wanted Anders to be punished for his lack of trust in him and, more pettily, for Anders choosing to leave him, choosing his crusade for mages’ rights over him. 

Was it selfish to want to be first in someone’s thoughts, to have them choose you again and again? Choosing his mother’s and Varania’s happiness over his own out of his love for them was what had driven him to compete for his markings, and he had done the same for Anders in – albeit unknowingly – helping the mage scheme with Orsino to destroy the Gallows. Would it ever be reciprocated? Varania had chosen an almost certainly fictional apprenticeship over him, and Anders had sacrificed Fenris in favor of his personal war against the templars and the Chantry. Selfishness was not something Fenris had often indulged in, but he felt it now, wanting the same consideration he’d given those he loved and whom he’d thought loved him. Maybe it was unfair to think that everyone loved the same way, made the same sacrifices. And, of course, this failed to take into account Justice. Anders had said that the spirit acted on his wishes, implacable as an avalanche, but what if that wasn’t entirely the truth? What if Justice had more say in matters than Anders thought and used Anders’s body to his own ends? 

It didn’t matter, Fenris decided. He could be selfish now. Perhaps he had not died at Anders’s hands, but he was the one who’d been lied to, even as he was the one Anders most owed the truth. His trust had been as fragile as a newly hatched chick, and yet Anders had held it too fast, like an over-eager child warned to be gentle. But Fenris knew the truth of everything now, even if Cullen and the Arishok did not, and if Anders was going to suffer consequences for the wrongs he’d done to Fenris, he would suffer them at Fenris’s hands, not Cullen’s, not the Knight-Commander’s, and not the blighted Arishok’s. If he rescued the mage from the Qunari’s hold, it would not be to give Anders his freedom but to let Fenris be the one to decide if the mage deserved it. 

Once the Qunari procession had passed, Fenris slunk out of the shadows of the portico and began his circuit of the Keep. His markings could unlock any door for him, but that would do him no good if he was caught by the Qunari before finding Anders. Then again, he wasn’t certain what would happen if he _did_ find the mage, since the Qunari weren’t likely to let Anders go sauntering out of the Keep without his Arvaarad in tow. With Anders leashed, collared, and cut off from his magic, they couldn’t face an entire Keep full of Qunari. 

As he turned a corner, heading for one of the servants’ entrances, a slender elvhen woman with her arms full of a basket heaped with vegetables barreled into him. She sat down hard on the paving stones, squash and turnips rolling every which way. 

“Apologies, Messere!” she cried in a high, childlike voice that was oddly familiar, scrambling onto her hands and knees to gather up the produce. “I should have been watching where I was going! Please don’t tell the kitchen mistress about this, Messere!” 

Fenris stooped down beside her, picking up a wayward cabbage and putting it in her basket. Now that he had gotten a clearer look at her face, she looked familiar too, though in his mind’s eye, he saw her as sickly thin, cheekbones so sharp they seemed about to slice through her skin. Yes, the slave girl whose father and grandfather Hadriana had killed in her futile attempt to protect herself from Fenris. Her cheeks were fuller now, but she still had those hectic, desperate-to-please eyes. 

“You need not apologize. I should have been paying more attention to where I was going,” he said, handing her a head of broccoli and trying to force his lips into a friendly smile. Such attempts usually earned him nothing but strange looks and quick retreats, but the elvhen woman’s eyes widened and her thin face broke into a grin. 

“It’s you, Messere!” she cried. “I thought it was! You might not remember me, but you rescued me from the slavers in those awful caves!” Her smile faltered and fell into a frown. “I never caught your name, though. But I’ve been so grateful to you, Messere, for what you did.” 

“Do you work in the Keep now?” he asked, keeping his voice gentle. “I thought you had a position in Lowtown.” His throat tightened – that position in Lirene’s shop had been Anders’s doing, and even knowing that the mage was alive hadn’t made it any easier to speak of him. 

“Oh,” she murmured, dropping her gaze to her thin hands as they wrung the hem of her apron. “Messere Lirene… she left soon after the Viscount disappeared. One of the Qunari women took over the shop, but I—” She swallowed hard, and when she glanced up at him again, a careful smile trembled on her lips. “It was decided that I could better serve the Qun in the kitchens here at the Keep. But I do enjoy it, Messere! Papa taught me how to cook before….” She trailed off again. 

“So you have converted to the Qun?” he asked. 

She chewed on her lip for a moment, and he could tell that she was casting about for an answer, what would please him most while not upsetting her Qunari masters, though none of them were within earshot. He knew that struggle, the constant conflict between having one’s own thoughts and feelings while always remembering that one’s thoughts and feelings were meaningless in comparison to one’s master’s. 

“Never mind. You don’t have to answer that.” 

She wilted a bit in relief at that and took his hand as he helped her to her feet. “Thank you, Messere. I do truly enjoy working in the kitchens. It might sound silly, but it makes me feel close to my papa and my grandpapa.” 

“I am glad to hear it,” Fenris said, trying to ignore the sting of envy that he felt – his memories of his mother were still hazy, but he couldn’t imagine wanting to feel close to Varania, not now, not even only in reminiscence. “Are the Qunari appreciative of your cooking?” 

She let out a trill of nervous laughter. “I don’t know, Messere!” she whispered, leaning closer to him as if to share a secret. She smelled like cooked onions and baking bread, and the scent made tears prick at his eyes – perhaps he remembered his mother more than he thought. “They always look so grumpy that it’s impossible to tell.” 

They strolled along, Fenris purposefully dragging his heels to detain her longer. “It may be an odd question, but… how do they feed their Saarebas? With their mouths sewn shut as they are.” 

Her eyes widened, but to her credit, she didn’t show any fear at the mention of the Qunari mages – even losing her family to Hadriana’s blood magic hadn’t filled her with the same hatred and mistrust as it had him. He wasn’t sure if he thought her wise or foolish. “They only get horrible gruel, Messere. Sometimes I get to make soup for them, though, but it’s no more than broth. I’m glad they get something tasty for a change, but it’s not easy to carry the big soup pot down to the barracks!” 

They reached a plain wooden door cut into the unfinished stone of the Keep’s lowest level, and she took a few steps ahead of him, shifting her basket to one hip as she opened the door. “Well, I must get back to work, Messere.” She bobbed a quick, studied curtsy at him. “ _Panahedan_.” 

Fenris bowed and replied, “ _Panahedan_ ,” and then she slipped into the Keep kitchens, shutting the door behind her. He could hear a bolt slide into place on the other side, but locks were useless against him. The girl had given him useful information, and he was relieved that she’d done so without compromising herself at all. He’d never been inside the Viscount’s Keep, but he had been in enough fortresses and keeps in his travels with Danarius to know where guard barracks would be located. Now he just needed to find a way to get the mage out of that wretched collar and chains. He flexed his hands, listening to the joints of his fingerguards scrape together. His fingertips blazed with blue light as he activated the lyrium in his hands. If he could reach through doors to unlock them, how much more of a hindrance could a metal collar be? He knew the how and where of it now – all that remained was the _when_.


	38. Chapter 38

Justice’s protection had been like sinking into a warm bath after a long day in the snowy forest chopping wood – even with only some of the spirit’s barriers pushed back, Anders could feel every gnawing hunger pang, every twinge of his lips when he tried to speak, every ache and bruise magnified. Still, he tried to hold Justice back as much as he could during the day – there would be no more conversations with the Arishok that he wasn’t privy to, and he had doubts about the standard of care his patients were getting if Justice was in charge of the healing magic. The spirit had always been stingy with the healing spells when they’d worked in the clinic before, preferring to dole out potions and salves instead of using Anders’s limited mana on healing, so perhaps not much damage had been done.

There was something reassuring and familiar about working in the clinic again, especially without the constant threat of a templar raid hanging over his head. Even the pain in his lower back, which arrived even sooner than before under the weight of his collar and chains, seemed like an old friend, or at least a well-known enemy who was annoying but easily out-maneuvered. Sometimes he thought he could glance up and see Fenris’s lyrium-embroidered foot and the slim length of his calf through the gap in the front door, as he had in the days when the elf had guarded the clinic, but through the slats of his visor, all he could make out was a limp Deathroot sapling and the broken remnants of the lantern that had once hung outside. 

In spite of his efforts at holding the spirit back, Justice seemed to encroach on his vision, narrowing it even more than the Saarebas mask did, as if Anders were a fractious horse to be fitted with blinkers. The mostly elvhen clinic helpers, all of them Viddathari, brought the patients in, set them on the table in front of Anders, and then either carried them away again or ushered them out of the clinic if they were well enough. The child gasping for breath from the chokedamp was whisked away after a potion had soothed his lungs, and a man – large, red-haired and red-bearded – replaced him. 

As Anders gently probed the knife wound in the man’s gut, he thought he recognized him – in his mind’s eye he saw the blaze of red hair above a suit of Silverite armor, a breastplate emblazoned with a flaming sword. But the fellow was dressed in the rough clothes of most residents of Darktown, and the templars were done in Kirkwall, Anders had seen to that himself. And yet, he could place the man’s face in the Gallows on the rare occasions when he had been bold enough to make the short ferry trip across the bay to the island, at first to see where Karl was being held and then to buy herbs from the Formari herbalist whose stall had been in the Gallows Courtyard. 

The man groaned, blood bubbling from his lips and flecking his beard, and Anders reached for the Fade to cast a healing spell – he didn’t like using mana on a templar, but it went against everything he’d learned as a Spirit Healer to let someone die when he could help them, even if it was only to provide comfort before death. But as he tried to connect to the Fade, something dragged him back, and the magic flickered fitfully through his fingertips before melting away. He glanced at his Arvaarad, who stood silently in the corner, never taking his eyes from Anders, but the Qunari gave no sign of having used the control device. 

Blinking in confusion, he cast a fire spell and immediately used it to brighten the flames in the lantern above the cot when his Arvaarad growled a command and let his huge hand rest threateningly on the control rod. So he wasn’t cut off from the Fade completely then. He cast the healing spell again, his hands hovering over the templar’s wound… and was met with nothing, that same slick, translucent wall between him and the Fade, the same sensation of being pulled back as if by a tide. 

_Let me heal, Justice_ , he snapped at the spirit. _This is our purpose, our duty. It is wrong to let someone die who has done nothing to threaten us._

_He is one of them!_ Justice roared in reply, loud enough that Anders wanted to press his hands against his temples, as if he could keep his head from cracking open like an egg, bursting apart from the thunderous rage in Justice’s voice. _We must not waste our strength!_

My _strength_ , Anders replied. He and Justice had killed templars before – it was one of the first things they’d done as one being, but only when threatened, and this man on the cot before him, gurgling as his blood pooled in his throat, was no threat. _You told me there was no Vengeance, that Vengeance was just you acting on my anger. What is this now, Justice? This is not_ my _anger. And yet you are showing no mercy._

_A templar does not deserve mercy_ , Justice replied and then went silent, though the wall, glassy as it was, remained between Anders and the Fade every time he tried to cast a healing spell. All he could do was make a poultice of elfroot and other herbs to bind the wound and try to pour a potion down the man’s throat, though most of it dribbled out the sides of his slack mouth and pooled with the blood in his beard. Anders would have hastened the death as humanely as he could had not the Arvaarad been watching, but as it was, he simply sat beside the cot and waited helplessly as the templar’s breathing coarsened, then slowed, then stopped. Anders gestured to the Viddathari elves, and they carried the body away, struggling under the burden of the man’s dead weight. 

_If you’re feeling bloody-minded, why not try to overwhelm the Arvaarad?_ he asked Justice. He was certain the spirit could turn the Qunari into a cinder before the Arvaarad could activate the control device, and if that brought other Qunari or the Viddathari helpers down on them, an unfettered Justice could deal with them as well. It might not have been just or merciful, but mercy had never much interested Justice, and it seemed that his own purpose was no longer paramount in his thoughts. 

_Patience, Anders_ , Justice rumbled, calmer now, ocean waves heard from a distance rather than a raging waterfall close up. _I have been making good progress with the Arishok. Soon there will be no Circle in Kirkwall again for a generation. Perhaps never again._

Anders sighed, wishing he could roll an elfroot leaf up small enough to slip between his sewn-together lips and chew on it to soothe his growing nausea. His stomach roiled constantly, in spite of the bland diet of gruel he subsisted on, perhaps from the stress of never knowing what Justice was doing when the spirit shut him away in that corner of his own mind that he was allowed. 

_I did spend a year in the dungeon at Kinloch Hold, you know_ , he told Justice. _I appreciate you trying to protect me, but I think I can manage now. You can still have your little chats with the Arishok, if you must, but I’d like to listen in, and I’d like to have some control over my own body. I’m sure you’ll be the first to know if I need you._

Justice’s only response was a wounded silence, but he withdrew and left Anders to his stinging lips, churning stomach, and aching back. Anders closed up the clinic for the day and was led by the Arvaarad through the cowed streets of Kirkwall. The city was like a kicked dog under the Arishok’s rule, more so than it had ever been under the Viscount or under the combined oversight of the Knight-Commander and the Grand Cleric. The Viscount had ruled for the benefit of the rich of Hightown, and the templars and the Chantry both had their pet issues that kept them from paying any mind to the poor of the Undercity, which had mostly suited the residents of Darktown and Lowtown just fine, from what Anders could tell. Not so under the Qunari, who did take in interest in the lives of the city’s poor but with an eye to controlling them. He remembered Fenris saying that he hadn’t escaped one form of slavery to become a slave to himself under the Qun, and Anders finally understood what the elf had meant by it. 

When they arrived at the Keep, the Arvaarad took Anders to the throne room, where the Arishok was huddled with a few other Qunari who Anders thought were Ben-Hassrath. He wondered if maybe after all this time, Justice was fluent in Qunlat – Anders himself certainly wasn’t. The Arvaarad kept him back until the other Qunari left and the Arishok gestured to them to approach, but Anders thought he heard the term “bas-Arvaarad” being used, which Fenris had thought was the word the Qunari used for templars. What could they be discussing with regard to the templars? There were no organized templars left in Kirkwall, and the possible number of templars in hiding had gone down by one when the man had died in the clinic earlier. _When we_ let _him die_ , Anders reminded himself. Could they be talking about Cullen? Perhaps he’d been found and brought in – would the Arishok’s lack of disgust for his prized bas-Saarebas make him grant Anders an interview in the Keep dungeon with Cullen? He didn’t have anything in particular to say to the man, and there was a good chance that Cullen would denounce him as an abomination, but if he could just ask him about Fenris, if Fenris was well, what they’d been doing attacking Qunari patrols, if he and Fenris had…. 

Anders smothered that line of thought before it could fully take shape. It was a foolish thing to worry about, for a start, considering that Anders was in mid-peril and Fenris might be too, but also he would wish Fenris’s forgiveness for the Gallows, and that meant offering forgiveness for anything Fenris might have done when he’d thought Anders was dead. _As if I have any right to offer forgiveness_ , he thought, _and Fenris would rightly spit in my face if I tried to offer it. He’ll be the one doing all the forgiving, if I ever see him again. After all, what’s fucking one templar – if he even did! – compared to what I’ve done and how I must have hurt him?_

The Ben-Hassrath departed, and the Arishok settled wearily back onto the Viscount’s throne. One of arms of it was battered to splinters, Anders noticed, the gold-painted wood shattered, the velvet padding dangling by a thread. Perhaps the Ben-Hassrath had not brought news the Arishok wanted to hear. For a moment, Anders thought he and the Arvaarad would be dismissed and he’d be dragged down to the barracks for a long evening of being stared at, but then the Arishok raised his hand and gestured for them to approach. A little flutter of panic bloomed in Anders’s stomach – he hadn’t had a conversation with the Arishok since the day the Qunari rescued him from the ruins of the Gallows, and neither of those had gone particularly well. Justice seemed more at ease with the Qunari’s brand of humorlessness and dedication to an abstract ideal. 

The Arishok’s questions about how Anders found the mood in the Undercity, he could answer well enough, if not completely truthfully, though he didn’t say anything about the templar who had died in the clinic that afternoon. At the same time, he was tempted to ask about what the Arishok had been discussing with the Ben-Hassrath – the Ben-Hassrath were something like spies, he’d come to realize, so maybe they’d found some templar holdouts hiding in Darktown. Judging by the two-warrior force of Cullen and Fenris, it didn’t appear that Cullen had been successful in corralling his surviving men. 

“Have you had any further communications from the Grand Cleric?” Anders asked, trying to make his voice appropriately grave. 

“She refuses to offer up the culprits in the Viscount’s kidnapping, though she must know who they are,” the Arishok growled, running a hand over his forehead. With his broad shoulders slumped and his brow deeply furrowed, the Qunari looked miserable enough for Anders to be tempted to offer a healing spell for a headache. “She offers hollow promises of intervention when the time is right, as if she has a bargaining position left. My patience for this Southern way of polite inaction is at an end. We will march against the Chantry and put an end to its pretense to equality with the Qun. If that is the case, we will need your healing magic. Then and later.” 

Exultation surged up in Anders, but it felt wrong, secondhand – it belonged to Justice and not him. He swallowed hard, willing his voice to remain steady when he spoke again. “Why later?” 

“The Qun will adjust its demands, and we will respond to those demands,” the Arishok replied, as if it were the most obvious answer. “Those demands might include marching on the other cities in the Free Marches, but they might not. It is not my duty to question the possibilities before time.” 

Anders chewed the inside of his lip, struggling with the question resting heavily on the tip of his tongue, held back only by the flimsy barrier of the thread holding his lips together. If he and Justice truly cared about mages’ rights, he had to ask it. “What will become of the Circles in those cities? Will you march on them as you did the Gallows, or will they be left to themselves?” 

The Arishok shrugged, a careless gesture that sat strangely on his dour face and solid bulk. “This is all mere speculation. We will do as the Qun demands when the time comes.” 

How did Justice – so fond of clear-cut black-and-white answers – accept this wishy-washy nonsense? Of course, the Arishok could be decisive in the spirit’s mold at times, but now he seemed far too similar to the Grand Cleric herself for Anders’s liking. 

“What has the Qun demanded be done with bas mages in the past?” Anders prompted hesitantly. He knew the answer, and Justice should have known it as well, but perhaps hearing it directly from the Arishok would make the spirit realize that being allied to the Qunari was foolhardy. 

“They will be killed to prevent them from spreading their poison. Or they will be given _qamek_. That has been the custom.” He gave Anders a look that somehow managed to be approving and surly at the same time. “You have done well as a bas-Saarebas, so if there are others like you at these Circles, perhaps they will be given to an Arvaarad as well and made bas-Saarebas.” 

_NO!_ It was a thunderclap of a word, reverberating in his skull so loudly he thought the Arishok might be able to hear it. He scrambled to regain control, but in his hindered vision, he already saw black threads of smoke rising from his body, and from the shock bordering on terror on the Arishok’s face, he knew that the bare skin of his arms and chest was cracked and fissured with glowing blue light. 

“You will never take another mage as you have taken Anders!” Justice roared, and Anders felt as though he were trying to cling to the magic that blew up the Gallows – he felt his consciousness being hurled upward, borne on the surging wave that was Justice’s rage. And then both of them collided with that wall between them and the Fade, the connection to it that Justice had tried to open through Anders snapping back as if cut. 

_It is no matter_ , Justice rumbled. _We have killed without magic before._

Anders hoped they could again. They’d have to, for there was no talking his way out of this – he’d been exposed as surely as if he’d dropped his kilt; what he was could be seen in every glowing fracture of his skin, heard in every bellow of Justice’s voice. The Arishok had recovered himself slightly and bolted up from the throne, clutching a battle axe and a blunt two-bladed shortsword, and was shouting in Qunari at the Arvaarad, at the other guards, all of whom had terror writ on their usually stoic faces. At least no other Saarebas were present, Anders thought, but that could change at any moment. No, this time it would be kill without magic or be killed. 

“Demon!” the Arishok cried, rounding on Justice again, eyes wild in the blue light shining through Anders’s skin and eyes. “You have spewed your words at me to poison my control and make me deviate from the demands of the Qun! The Qun requires your death!” 

Justice would have held fast in the face of an advancing Qunari, but Anders wrestled control back enough to turn and stumble down the red-carpeted stairs toward the double doors of the throne room. He only made it a few steps before there was a flash of blue-white light and a strange buzzing, and his muscles locked tight. Momentum carried his body forward, and he tumbled to the bottom of the stairs, lying prone on the cold tile floor, every muscle knotted to the point of cramping. He could hear the creak of boiled leather and the measured thud of heavy footsteps as the Arishok descended the steps behind him, but he couldn’t even drag himself away. 

As the Arishok’s great horned shadow fell across him, stretching toward the doors that Anders yearned to reach, the entire Keep shook, as if someone had cast Fist of the Maker on the whole fortress. Alarms pealed, echoing through the marble walls, making them vibrate so hard that the chandeliers above him swayed, the silhouettes of the Qunari careening across the walls and ceiling. 

The Arishok barked a few words at some of the guards, who rushed out of the throne room, but his footsteps barely paused. Through the open doors came the clash and clang of swords, the acrid scent of _gaatlok_ , the crackle of magic… and the deadening response of Holy Smite? 

“The bas are trying to retake their cesspit of a city,” the Arishok said. “I would leave them to it, but that is not what the Qun demands. First, though, basra, your death.” 

Anders squeezed his eyes shut, his body trying to cringe in anticipation of being run through by the Arishok’s brutal shortsword but being held motionless by the Arvaarad’s control rod. His skin prickled, the hair on the back of his neck and his arms straining upward as the air stirred, the swing of sharp steel whistling through it. 

But the blow never fell. He parted one eye, peering through the shifting blue halo that kept him paralyzed. There, just a few inches from his nose, was a bare, long-toed foot, its smooth dusky skin emblazoned with swirls of blue-gleaming lyrium. 

Over the tumult of alarms and the shouts of battle came Fenris’s voice, “ _Ebasit kata itwa-ost_ , Arishok.”


	39. Chapter 39

For days after finding the entrance to the Keep’s kitchens, Fenris did nothing. The mansion was empty again, other than the cats, who roundly scolded him for having been away, and their furious meows were the only accompaniment to the rasp of his blade against the whetstone. His qualms about freeing Anders had lessened, the voice that insinuated that Anders deserved what he was getting quieted. When it did clamor in his head, he thought of Anders shouting “For freedom!” when they’d fought Danarius and his slaver thugs for Fenris’s own freedom. No matter what Anders had done, Fenris did owe him – partly – his life. That time, at least, Anders had chosen him, even when Fenris’s own sister hadn’t, had given up the possibility of wealth, his dreams of the Imperium, his opportunity to escape a life on the run. Not that Fenris believed for a moment that Danarius would have fulfilled his promises to Anders any more than he would those he’d given to Varania, but the mage had no way of knowing that and he’d still – after a moment’s hesitation that still rankled with Fenris – thrown himself into battle against the magister. Fenris might have been back in Minrathous, wearing nothing but chains of gold and a sheen of oil, without a memory in his head of the mage if not for Anders.

So it was blood for blood again, as it had been when they first met, the constant bartering that kept them in each other’s orbits. Perhaps rescuing Anders from the Arishok and a life of slavery would be enough to free Fenris as well, the ultimate debt paid absolutely. 

With Orsino and the mages gone, he’d moved back into the room he’d once shared with Anders, though the presence of others had changed it enough to keep his memories of their time together at bay. Someone had swept up all the cobwebs, disposed of the empty wine bottles, stolen the lute that Fenris never played and that Anders had tried to play, much to the chagrin of the cats, whose yowls had sounded rather similar to the sounds Anders had wrung from the instrument. He had dragged one of the armchairs in front of the fire, its back to the bed, and sat there staring into the flames and sharpening his sword. 

Over the scrape of the whetstone, he heard a knocking from downstairs that sent the cats scattering. He levered himself up from the chair and went over to the window, looking down at the street below. At the former servants’ entrance, he could see the top of a familiar golden head, though not the one he’d foolishly hoped for. He’d already said his goodbyes to Cullen, so the templar could knock until his fist was bruised. Fenris went back to the armchair and took up the whetstone again. 

Downstairs, the door creaked open and firm, unhesitating steps rang through the main hall, thumping briskly up the stairs. 

“The door does have a lock, you know,” Cullen said from the doorway. “With the Qunari raiding Hightown mansions, I’m surprised you don’t make use of it.” 

Fenris raised his head but didn’t look at his visitor, his hand never pausing on his blade. “That lock wouldn’t stop a determined Sten, would it?” 

“Fair enough,” Cullen replied, taking a few steps into the room, seemingly aware that his presence wasn’t welcome but not deterred by it. “I sent a note a few days ago, but… ah,” he said, and Fenris heard the faint skitter of crumpled paper being pushed across the tabletop behind him. 

“In the Imperium, they don’t teach their slaves to read as you do in the south,” Fenris said. He mentally thanked Anders for giving him a healthy store of ways to annoy the templar – even if he didn’t exactly believe what he’d just said, hearing Cullen’s exasperated sigh made it worthwhile. 

“Your friend the abomination certainly taught you well, though apparently his lessons skimped on the reading too,” Cullen said, words crisp and bitten-off. Then he sighed again, tiredly this time, and Fenris knew without looking at him that he was rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m doing a poor job of showing it, but I didn’t come here to argue with you. I wanted you to know that the Knight-Commander is a few days’ ride outside of the city… and she has brought an Exalted March with her.” 

Fenris bolted up from his chair, still clutching his sword in one hand and the whetstone in the other. “But why? The mages are gone. What use is an Exalted March?” 

“The Qunari,” Cullen replied. “I sent a raven some weeks back, after the explosion at the Gallows, informing her that it had been destroyed by Qunari magic. That must have tipped the scales in her favor with the Divine.” 

The expected struggle with whether he should tell Cullen the truth of the Gallows’ destruction never came. With Anders alive, the Circle mages safely out of the city, and the Qunari making it clear that Kirkwall was a colonial outpost, it was more obvious than ever to Fenris that doing so would serve no purpose. Was it so unfair to punish the Qunari for something they hadn’t done when they were so deserving of punishment for other injustices? He doubted that the Knight-Commander and her Exalted March would limit themselves to wreaking their vengeance on the Saarebas. 

“Are you going to rejoin the Knight-Commander when she retakes the city?” he asked. He had no intention of asking for Cullen’s help and had no need of it, but if he did manage to free Anders, he had to know if there would be templars waiting for them outside the Keep. 

A tremor passed over Cullen’s face, indecision briefly rumpling his features. “Yes,” he replied. “For the attack against the Qunari. As for the rest, I don’t know.” He sighed, a long purging exhalation. “I have been training to be a templar since I was eight years old. The uprising at the Ferelden Circle steeled my resolve that mages must be controlled for a time, and not without cause, I think. But now, I am not sure. Even at the Circle, I never lived in such close company with them as I did here, and perhaps the danger is not quite what I believed.” 

Fenris felt a sneer forming on his lips, but it faltered – hadn’t he done the same? Cullen’s journey was not dissimilar to his own, though perhaps truncated. Hadn’t he been sharpening his sword for the last few hours while trying to formulate a plan to rescue a mage? 

When he made no reply other than a jerking nod, Cullen said, “I do still think you should leave Kirkwall, but you will face no threat from me or the templars, if I can help it. Either of you.” 

“Thank you, Knight-Captain,” Fenris replied. He gave Cullen a brief formal bow, but the templar reached out his hand as if to shake Fenris’s. 

“Good luck with whatever it is you’re planning,” Cullen said with a smile that gave Fenris a glimpse of the boy who had dreamed of being a templar. 

He wriggled his hand free of his gauntlet and shook Cullen’s. “And to you. As the Qunari say, I hope you do not die.” 

****************

A city under Qunari rule was hardly a hotbed for rumor, but even so, Fenris managed to hear whispers of the Exalted March massing outside of Kirkwall. Most of the city elves had converted to the Qun, so when people saw he was an elf, they usually went silent and refused to say anything else, even when he offered them a pint of Hanged Man ale in exchange for information. He wondered how many of these Kirkwallers would survive what to them was still just hearsay – their city had seen so much upheaval that they seemed inured to it. The elves, he knew, would be put to the sword. The Qunari claimed that the Viddathari were their own, but there was a hierarchy, and the Viddathari were rarely more than propaganda, put on show to convert others to the Qun. 

Two days after Cullen’s visit, from his perch in the tower room, Fenris saw a cloud of dust rising in the direction of Sundermount, road dust churned up by the hooves of countless horses and booted marching feet. It snagged on the topmost tower of the Keep and tore in two before drifting out over the bay and dissipating. He wondered if the templars would do the same – flood into Hightown and be broken by the Arishok and his forces in the Keep. _Let them all destroy each other_ , he told himself, testing the edge of his sword as he swung his gaze back to the Keep’s tower, all the tons of marble and stone and Qunari steel that kept him from Anders. Whether a templar or a Qunari sat on the Viscount’s throne by the end of the following day, it didn’t matter – if he freed the mage, he alone would have carried the day.   


  
The next morning, the shadows still long and dark in the early sun, Fenris took up his post outside the entrance to the Keep’s kitchens. A steady stream of workers, elvhen and Qunari, bustled in and out of the door like ants swarming from a colony. He thought he caught a glimpse of the slave girl – _former_ slave girl – trundling along with another basket of produce and wondered if he could impose on her goodwill again. It would be much easier to enter the Keep on the pretense of being someone’s brother or suitor, but it also would have been more dangerous for her, so he kept to the shadows and he waited. 

After the midday meal, there was a lull in the activity, and he decided that he had to take his chance now or else wait for nightfall and risk the Exalted March storming the city before he had a chance to breach the Keep. The Arishok would surely have dragged his prized healing bas-Saarebas into battle, and then Anders might be all but lost to him – the templars returning with the Knight-Commander would be in full possession of their skills, unlike Cullen, and they would likely pick off the Saarebas as quickly as possible. That one of those Saarebas was human would not stay their hands beyond a few brief moments of confusion and surprise. 

When the narrow alleyway was clear, Fenris activated his markings and phased his hand through the wooden door, feeling around for the bolt on the inside. No screams at seeing a disembodied, glowing hand rang out from the other side of the door, so he slid the bolt and pushed the door open. The kitchens were dark and warm, fires still roaring on the many hearths, though no cooking was being done. He slipped through long rows of shelves laden with food, dodging ropes of garlic and herbs hanging from the ceiling. Finally, he came to a set of double doors that opened onto an empty corridor, the stone of the walls rough-hewn, not meant to be seen by the nobility and honored guests who would have been abovestairs. 

He said a silent prayer of thanks that the Qunari were so heavy on their feet – he knew them to be quick and agile fighters, but they were not quiet as they lumbered through the corridors, and he could easily duck out of sight before they came upon him. The light from his markings should have called attention to him, but he was a lyrium ghost – a wraith who could bend the eye around himself, flitting in and out of sight as he phased through walls and flesh with equal ease. A few Viddasala passed him in the hallway, when the burn in his markings became too great and he had to let them wink out, but the Qunari women seemed to weigh him with their eyes and classify him neatly as one of the elvhen Viddathari servants, though one did peer closely at his markings as she went past. 

Trying to circle the lowest floor of the Keep to find the old City Guard barracks got him nowhere – he passed the doors to the kitchens again before realizing that he would have to go up and out to find the staircase that led to the barracks. It seemed that the hired help in the Free Marches were as stratified as the slaves in the Imperium, and the kitchen and household servants had been kept separately from the guards. Letting his markings flare again and trying not to hiss as the skin around them seared with pain, he climbed the wide stone staircase up to the main level of the Keep. 

The massive, high-ceilinged room was full of ragged, exhausted-looking Hightown residents, some of whom had once been Fenris’s neighbors, their finery dull, their faces haggard. The number of the Arishok’s hostages was dwindling, it seemed, but Fenris still tried to blend in with them as best he could. The Qunari guards may not have been able to tell one human from another human or one elf servant from another elf servant, but if his appearance caused a stir among the hostages, the Qunari would eventually take notice. 

He re-activated his brands when he reached the staircase that led to the entrance to the barracks, and the nobles who had been eyeing him suspiciously were suddenly left staring in confusion at the place he’d just been. They must have been beyond caring about the goings-on within the Keep, though, for none of them raised an alarm. By the time he passed through the wide doorway and started down the steps into the old City Guard barracks, he was practically running, taking the stairs two at a time. 

The first room he ducked into had clearly once been an office of some sort – it reminded him a bit of the First Enchanter’s office, only without bars on the windows. The bookcases lining the walls behind the broad desk were empty now, though the desk itself was stacked with the books that the Ben-Hassrath handed out to converts to educate them in the ways of the Qun. What Fenris assumed had once been a shield bearing the crest of the City Guard had been torn down and lay on the blood-red carpet like the shell of a tortoise, the body long since rotted away. The shield had been replaced on the wall by a few of the blunt, brutal weapons the Qunari favored and a wooden diamond carved with the House of Tides sigil that Fenris recognized all too well from his time on Seheron. 

He slipped out of the office and past another room full of long tables, maybe where the elvhen servant girl served the Arvaarads their food and delivered the gruel that was forced between the sewn-up lips of Anders and the other Saarebas. On his right was another set of wide doors, which opened when he tried the latch. He supposed there was no reason for locks when the Saarebas were constantly monitored by their Arvaarads. 

This room had rough bunks stacked from floor to ceiling, though most of them no longer had even a thin, hay-filled mattress. For something that appeared to be a dormitory, it seemed oddly uninhabited, save for one low bunk that did have a mattress, a flimsy blanket, and one of the kilts worn by the Saarebas hanging from a hook beside it. A kilt sized for a human. 

Fenris’s stomach roiled at the thought of Anders being kept down here, alone but for the Arvaarad watching over him, unable to speak or even see properly. It must have been like his year in solitary confinement at the Fereldan Circle all over again, from what Anders had told him of it and what Fenris could glean from the mage’s mutterings when he had nightmares. And he had considered leaving the mage to this fate. Guilt washed over him, bringing up the taste of sick on his tongue even as it firmed his resolve. 

“ _Teth a_!” a deep voice barked from behind him. 

Fenris whirled around to find the doorway to the bunkroom filled by a Qunari, an Arvaarad, he thought, judging by the helmet with its slatted mask. He couldn’t tell if this Arvaarad was the one who had been with Anders the night Fenris and Cullen attacked them, if that Arvaarad had survived after all. The Qunari bore no weapons, but they hardly needed them against most foes. 

“What do you do here, bas?” the Qunari asked, the words of the common tongue halting and uncomfortable in his mouth. 

“Where is the bas-Saarebas you keep here?” Fenris demanded. The time for subterfuge was long past – if he had to tear through a wall of Qunari flesh to reach the mage, so be it. 

The Arvaarad sneered, a flash of sharp teeth visible behind his mask. “I do not have to answer to a kabethari. You, on the other hand, will tell me your business or I will take you to the Viddasala so you can be made Viddath-bas.” 

Fenris’s hand strayed toward his shoulder to reach for the pommel of his sword, but instead he took a step toward the Qunari. His lips peeled back from his teeth at the threat of being made Viddath-bas. He had already had to collect the fragments of himself after Danarius’s handiwork – to have them taken from him again, even if he wouldn’t realize it and live out his life as a mindless laborer, was unthinkable. The burn of his markings sharpened, following their curving lines like seams of invisible flame. 

“Where is the bas-Saarebas you keep here?” he asked again, voice softer, like the rasp of a whetstone on a blade. 

The look in the Arvaarad’s eyes was more confused than intimidated – perhaps he was unused to bas ignoring his orders. The Qunari seemed to set himself more deliberately, as if anticipating a fight, but he made no move when Fenris took another step in his direction either. “What is the meaning of this insolence, basra?” 

Fenris did not activate his markings until he was within striking distance of the Arvaarad, but when he did, their light revealed the gleam of terror in the Qunari’s eyes. 

“Demon!” the Qunari cried, though the shout was choked off by a grunt of pain and surprise when Fenris’s fist plunged through the thick muscle and heavy bone of his chest. The Qunari’s heart was heavy in his hand, like a waterskin filled to the brim, and Fenris squeezed it, just enough to make the Arvaarad release a strangled groan. 

“Where is the bas-Saarebas you keep here, _Vashedan_?” Fenris asked once more, this time in Qunlat. “I will not ask again.” 

“Good,” the Qunari replied, voice level but tight. “I grow tired of your bleating.” 

It was said that true Qunari did not fear death, but having one’s heart slowly pierced by the points of a steel gauntlet seemed to have a remarkable tongue-loosening effect. The Arvaarad’s eyes bulged behind the slatted shield of his mask as Fenris tightened his grip, and his knees began to buckle. 

“He was taken to the throne room to speak with the Arishok,” he blurted. His breath whistled through his clenched teeth as he tried to stifle a sigh of relief when Fenris relaxed his hold. “Since Arvaarad and the bas-Saarebas have not returned to this room, they are still with the Arishok.” 

Fenris remembered living that narrow sort of life in which every move was prescribed by another’s needs and whims, always shuttling between the same few locations – cell to master’s chambers to kitchens to master’s chambers and so on. He had been lucky, he supposed, in that Danarius traveled a great deal and went abroad in Minrathous daily, always taking his prized pet with him, as Fenris had seen the Arishok doing with Anders, but even leagues away from home, the routines were always the same. Anders would have been accustomed to such a life after his time in the Circle, but he had fought so hard to escape it, and he had been taken from a life of wandering through fields and woods, so that he would always feel that lack when his freedom was taken in a way that Fenris had not. 

The Arvaarad’s arms twitched as if he were trying to fight Fenris off, but Fenris squeezed harder on the heart weighing heavily in his palm, and the Qunari’s struggles stopped. He should have been sliding his fist out of the Arvaarad’s chest, letting him collapse to the floor to pant and groan through the pain. Instead, he clenched his fingers, the claws of his fingerguards piercing the thick muscle of the Qunari’s heart, and yanked downward. The heart gave like a rotten fruit falling off the vine, and the Arvaarad crumpled at Fenris’s feet, leaving him with a bloody forearm and a gauntlet caked in gore. Inelegant, perhaps, and unnecessary – there were other ways of incapacitating people to ensure their silence. But, he thought as he stepped over the Qunari’s body, he was running two races – one against being found out by the Qunari in the Keep and the other against the Exalted March bearing down on Kirkwall.   


  
This time, the main hall was a buzzing hive of panicked activity, Qunari herding their Hightown hostages down the staircase toward the servants’ quarters, as heavily armed Stens and Karasaads rushed toward the huge double doors of the Keep. From beyond the doors, Fenris could hear fighting in the marble forecourt, the shouts of human voices invoking the Maker and Andraste, and the sound sped his steps toward the throne room. 

Then he heard a familiar sound – unwelcome but familiar – a faint roar like the distant throb of the sea in a shell: Justice. A few Karasaads lingered on the upper landings outside the entrance to the throne room, but Fenris easily dispatched them. He did not have time for mercy now. 

He ducked behind one of the doors as they swung open, a few Qunari with spears at the ready running out and thundering down the steps. Fenris waited a moment for others, and when none followed, he slipped into the anteroom, focused on the last set of doors between him and Anders. The world contracted around him – the clash of steel became muted behind him, the concern of what would come next forgotten. His blood-stained hand closed around the elaborate scroll of the doorknob, and he eased the throne room door open. What lay behind it was madness. 

Anders – or Justice – lay prone on the floor at the bottom of the steps leading to the Viscount’s throne, cocooned in blue light that shifted and crackled, his limbs strangely rigid. Midway up the steps of the dais sprawled an Arvaarad, throat slashed messily, a deep gash across his chest. And looming over Anders was the Arishok, clutching a bloodied axe and shortsword, his face twisted with rage and – strangely – fear. The golden control rod, streaked with blood too and giving off pulses of blue light, was shoved through the Arishok’s belt, riding on his hip like a sword. 

“I should have killed you from the start!” the Arishok roared at the mage’s stiff form. “The Qun demanded it, but I in my arrogance did not heed that demand! Now we are all tainted, and I will be denied Par Vollen forever.” 

In the main hall, the doors finally gave way with a resounding _clang_ and the noise of battle flooded into the breach. The Arishok raised his head, looking at the entrance to the throne room with bleary eyes that seemed to slide over Fenris, hidden in the shadows of one of the thick columns. 

“The bas are trying to retake their cesspit of a city,” the Arishok said, his voice suddenly calm, but it was an eerie calm, like the deadness in the air before a bolt of lightning. “I would leave them to it, but that is not what the Qun demands. First, though, _basra_ , your death.” 

The Arishok lifted the axe over his head, ready to cleave Anders in two. Not even Justice could have fixed the mage if that axe fell on his back. Anger boiled in Fenris’s gut – at the presumption of the Arishok for raising a hand to the mage, perhaps, or at Justice for apparently showing himself and putting Anders in danger – and churned with the icy fear of knowing that that axe could fall at any moment and all that could stand between Anders and death was Fenris’s own blade. Sweat sprang out on his palms, slicking the pommel of his sword. Would he be fast enough to catch the swing of that axe, strong enough to keep it from coming within a hairsbreadth of Anders’s bare back? He had trained for this, had saved Danarius from similar dangers more times than he could remember – but what if his training failed him the one time he cared about the person he was saving? What if his body failed him? 

Letting that confused jumble of fear and anger fuel him, Fenris darted from his hiding place, markings ablaze, to parry the blow. His blade caught the haft of the axe in mid-swing, and it took all his strength to keep himself from being thrown on top of Anders from the force of it. 

“It is ended,” he said in Qunlat through clenched teeth. “You all have fallen, Arishok.” 

A flicker of surprise passed over the Qunari’s face, even as he snarled in rage and frustration at his swing being halted in mid-air, its intended victim still untouched. “Another demon come through the torn Veil in this mistake of a place?” he asked and swung the shortsword – its square-edged blades hummed in the air as they flew past Fenris’s face. “Do you mean to frighten me? Do you think the will of the Qun can be thwarted by a few bas?” 

“Not a few,” Fenris replied, knocking the axe aside and using the momentum to bat the shortsword out of the way. “An Exalted March.” 

That drew a strangled exclamation from Anders, but the Arishok did not seem impressed or deterred. He stepped over the mage and advanced on Fenris, swinging his weapons in tight arcs – a flourish, Fenris thought, unlike the usual efficiency of Qunari combat – leaving himself open and unguarded. Fenris leapt forward, slashing at the Qunari, a vicious downward stroke that should have laid him open from shoulder to waist. 

But despite his pointless swagger, the Arishok managed to cross the axe and shortsword in time to stop Fenris’s attack. The deflection jarred him, reverberating up his arms until he felt like a struck gong. The Arishok threw him off with a sneer, and they whirled away from one another, Fenris dancing backward on the balls of his feet, always trying to put more space between Anders and the Arishok. He held his sword low in front of him, looking for an opportunity to thrust it into the Qunari’s gut and tear it open, but the Arishok lumbered toward him implacably, slashing almost wildly with the axe. 

Fenris moved to knock it away, cursing when he realized it for the feint it was. The Arishok swung the shortsword down with all of his strength, and Fenris desperately blocked it with the pommel of his sword. It glanced off the pommel, sending up sparks as its blade grazed his steel gauntlets. Fenris pushed the shortsword aside, but before he could attack or retreat, he threw himself into a crouch as the Arishok swiped the blade backhanded, so close that a fine shower of silver-white hair rained down onto the dark red carpet below. If Fenris had been a heartbeat slower, the tip of his ear might have joined the shorn hair or, worse, his entire head. 

He barely had time to straighten before the axe was swinging toward him again. He deflected it easily enough with his sword’s crossguard, and when the Arishok tried to throw him off once more, Fenris twisted, catching the Qunari’s jaw with his steel vambrace and elbow. With his markings alight, his elbow sheared through the Arishok’s cheek, slashing it open to his lips and giving him a lopsided leer. Dark blood fountained up in a fine spray like a swarm of flying ants, and the Arishok staggered a few paces away from Fenris, doubled over, more blood spilling from his lips and leaving a thin, syrupy trail on the carpet and the tiled floor. 

Fenris charged, ready to slash his sword across that broad hunched back, but the Qunari swung around and deflected the blow, knocking Fenris onto his heels. The Arishok may have been heavy on his feet, but his attacks were quicker than lightning strikes at the height of a storm, crashing down on Fenris in a flurry. The Qunari’s heavy axe with its spiked head tangled between Fenris’s crossguard and blade, and leaving himself open to a thrust from the Arishok’s shortsword, Fenris swept his sword down, ripping the axe’s haft from the Qunari’s hand. The weapon went careering end over end through the air until it landed with a clatter against one of the columns. 

Now they were on even terms. Fenris jabbed at the Arishok’s gut with his sword, but the Qunari stumbled backward before the blade could sink too deeply into his flesh, though blood gushed red down his side, mixing with the red vitaar. With the axe out of the way, Fenris tried to aim for the control device still stuck through the Arishok’s belt, whether to destroy it or somehow grab hold of it. The Arishok was on his heels, retreating before Fenris, parrying his thrusts but not attempting any of his own. Fenris glanced over at Anders, still enveloped in that strange blue static, still motionless. He hadn’t seen the Arishok kill the Arvaarad – could the Arishok have injured Anders in his rage then? Was the mage already dead? Dying? He had to finish this now. 

He leapt into the air, raising his sword above his head. It left him open, but if the blow fell where it was meant to, that wouldn’t matter – the Arishok would be split in two from horns to waist. The Qunari raised his shortsword as if to block the downward arc of Fenris’s blade, stumbling over his own heavy boots as he did, twisting as he fell backward. 

The point of Fenris’s sword sliced uselessly across the Arishok’s bloodied torso, laying open a shallow gash across his chest before splitting his wide belt. Fenris watched as the control device tumbled to the floor in a pile of thick leather – in that brief moment of inattention, the Arishok stabbed upward with his shortsword, meeting Fenris as he descended from his leap. The square-edged double blade punched through the spirit hide and steel of his breastplate and drove into his flesh, shattering his ribs. 

The Arishok held him there, spitted, flopping like a fish on a spear. Fenris watched his own blood trickle down the pommel of the Arishok’s shortsword and stain the silver-gray skin of his hand and arm. The air had been driven from his lungs by the initial stab, and now it felt as if a weight sat heavy on his chest – he could only breathe in shallow pants as pain seared through him. 

Finally, like a cat tired of playing with its prey, the Arishok lowered his sword with Fenris still impaled on it and tossed him aside, the steel sliding from his flesh. Fenris landed in a heap, lying still as he watched the Arishok’s boots pass by. He pressed one hand to the gaping wound in his abdomen, and with the other, he strained to reach the control device, lying on the carpet in the heavy coils of the Arishok’s belt. His vision grayed at the edges, going blurred and gauzy as if a veil were being drawn over his face and, as if printed on that veil, he saw the corpses of the Fog Warriors, their still-warm blood steaming in the cool air. His mind echoed with Hadriana’s cackle, like a cacophony of derisive ravens, and the words _“useless”, “failure”, “disappointment”. Not worth the lyrium in your skin._ What was the point of it? he wondered, and his hand paused in its scrabbling for the device. He was going to die, certainly, and without Fenris or his magic, Anders would follow closely behind. He’d failed Anders, just as he’d ultimately failed his family. The exhaustion and pain began to roll over him, and he wanted to let them claim him. 

_For freedom!_ rang in his ears, only now it was not his freedom that was being fought for, but Anders’s, short-lived though it might be. His hand stretched toward the control rod again, shaking with the effort, and his fingers closed around it. With his last bit of strength, he raised the device and smashed it against the cold tiled floor. A flash of blue seared what remained of his vision, and he collapsed. As darkness rolled over him, he hoped that, if nothing else, he had let Anders die a free man.


End file.
